Archive for Social Networking
Creative Professionals can now display their portfolios on LinkedIn
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Ed. note: This belongs to a series of posts on how professional web sites and services are integrating LinkedIn functionality using the LinkedIn API. This post is from Scott Belsky, CEO and co-founder of one of the leading platforms that helps creative professionals display their work – Behance.We are thrilled to introduce Creative Portfolio Display, an invaluable application for creative professionals within LinkedIn and beyond.
For too long, creative professionals in industries such as advertising, fashion, design, architecture, film, photography, and digital media have lacked tools to efficiently manage their portfolios and showcase their talent. Personal websites don’t adequately broadcast your work for discovery by industry peers and top companies and neither is it tied to your professional identity on the web. Plus, keeping your work samples up to date on multiple websites is inefficient, resulting in portfolios becoming outdated and forgotten.
With LinkedIn Creative Portfolio Display application, we aim to empower creative professionals by creating a one-stop solution for maintaining their work portfolio and broadcasting it to millions.
Introducing Creative Portfolio Display
With Creative Portfolio Display, LinkedIn members can create a free, multimedia work portfolio that is displayed on their LinkedIn profiles as well as other websites and galleries around the web. This new LinkedIn application is powered by the Behance Network, the leading online platform for creative professionals.
Here are some key features:
- From one central portfolio, your work can be displayed within LinkedIn, Behance.net, AIGA, MTV, and other networks/galleries around the web.
- The Behance Network is a free service, allowing you to host an unlimited number of multimedia projects that include still images, video reels, text, and/or audio samples.
- Creative Portfolio Display seamlessly syncs with your free Behance.net account; Create a new portfolio project on Behance.net, and it instantly appears on LinkedIn and our other partner platforms.
Through Behance’s Creative Portfolio Display application, LinkedIn becomes a tremendous opportunity for creative talent to get found and showcase their work to millions of visitors.
If you are a creative professional on LinkedIn, we invite you to join the Behance Network and sync your portfolio with LinkedIn. If you are already a member of the Behance Network, simply install the Creative Portfolio Display application on your LinkedIn Profile.
We welcome your feedback as we continue to improve LinkedIn Creative Portfolio Display and other Behance Network services.
Install The Creative Portfolio Display Application on LinkedIn
Filed under: LinkedIn Developer Network 
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Creative Professionals can now display their portfolios on LinkedIn
Legal Updates that matter to you, from lawyers on LinkedIn
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Ed. note: This belongs to a series of posts on how web sites and services are integrating LinkedIn functionality using the LinkedIn API. This post is from Aviva Cuyler, founder and CEO at JD Supra. JD Supra helps legal professionals showcase their expertise by bringing their content in front of a targeted audience.Last week saw the launch of JD Supra’s Legal Updates, an InApp that brings timely legal news and commentary to everyone on LinkedIn. Legal Updates publishes a feed of legal content matched to your profession or industry, and allows you to connect directly to any lawyer whose work you’ve read and insights you value.
We created Legal Updates to provide a networking tool for two groups:
- Lawyers who understand the importance of showcasing expertise by sharing useful content online; and
- All professionals on LinkedIn who count on valuable business intelligence and insight (in this case, legal insight) to stay ahead in their field.
Add Legal Updates to your LinkedIn homepage
1. A custom (and customizable) feed of important legal updates:
When you add Legal Updates to your LinkedIn homepage, we automatically match the feed of articles, alerts, and other documents to your industry or profession. The feed is also entirely customizable. Follow legal topics that matter to you (real estate, insurance, IP law, tech law, tax, employment law, etc.), or follow specific sources of content (the lawyers and law firms writing and publishing this information).
Additionally, throughout Legal Updates you can click to follow a particular subject or add a lawyer or law firm to your homepage feed.
2. A browsable, searchable archive of legal information directly within LinkedIn
Legal Updates also brings a rich repository of legal updates (articles, analysis, briefs, filings, and more) directly to LinkedIn. You can browse topics covering numerous industries, or search for information on a specific issue. Leading lawyers and law firms from around the world add their legal content daily.
3. For lawyers, powerful distribution, meaningful connections
Legal Updates allows lawyers and other legal professionals to upload and share their content directly within LinkedIn. Any lawyer can include a portfolio of legal content on their LinkedIn profile, be found in the Legal Updates archive, and distribute their work to professionals in the fields they serve.
Moreover, for any lawyer who has connected their JD Supra and LinkedIn accounts, we include an “Add to Network” link in their documents. Any professional reading Legal Updates can add those lawyers whose work they admire or find influential to their LinkedIn network.
Business intelligence just got richer on you LinkedIn homepage!
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Legal Updates that matter to you, from lawyers on LinkedIn
How can social media help your small business grow
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As part of our continuing series featuring our employees, we’re turning you over to Dan Yoo. Although many of our employees would describe themselves as entrepreneurial, Dan channels his passion as a foodie into investing in a brick and mortar business — a restaurant in the Financial District of San Francisco called Stone Korean Kitchen. Here he talks about how social sharing helped him increase sales in a measurable way.
When I started at LinkedIn earlier this year, I expected the work to be challenging and exciting. I was right. In addition, thinking about and working with social technologies has had a huge impact on how I and my fellow investors (including my colleague, Robby Kwok) promote Stone Korean Kitchen, a project we started with a third partner who runs the business full-time. We actively engage through our company page on LinkedIn and similar business pages on Yelp and Facebook. Also, we broadcast news and promotions through Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and Yelp to drive business to the restaurant. These social channels also help us find out what our customers think about us, and we use the feedback to address problems.
Perhaps the best example of the effect social media has had on our business is our most recent experience with social sharing through Groupon. Groupon is a service that enables companies to offer great discounts in bulk. The coupon only goes into effect if enough people purchase it. We were lucky enough to be featured as a San Francisco Groupon, and we sold 2,600 coupons as a result. This gave a huge boost to our business — our post-groupon revenue was, on average, 63% higher than our pre-Groupon revenue over the same amount of time.
You can see the initial spike in revenue in the graph below. That’s to be expected after distributing a coupon. What we found even more interesting was the “new normal” that resulted. Even after the bump from Groupon, our revenue has leveled off to almost 50% higher than before.
There are a few contributing factors to this, we believe. One is simply repeat customers, but the other is all of our social media efforts combining to create a viral spread of knowledge about Stone Korean Kitchen. After the Groupon bump, we got double the number of Yelp reviews each month than we had in the months prior to it. More Yelp reviews gave us added legitimacy and further boosted our ability to draw in customers. It was the online equivalent to walking by a crowded, bustling restaurant. If that many people are enjoying it, they must be on to something.
While it’s a lot of work to keep up with all of the activity in two such different worlds, I like how they interact with each other. I can bring my own expertise in high tech to the world of small business, and as an entrepreneur I am more aware of how much social technology increasingly now matters to small businesses around the world.
Also check out TechCrunch’s coverage of small businesses that features Dan and Robby’s social sharing experiments as a small business.
Filed under: LinkedIn for Small Business, New Hires 
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How can social media help your small business grow
Over 6 million LinkedIn members in India and counting…
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Ed. note: Jose Mallabo’s last Q&A blog post was on the topic of LinkedIn and Social Networking in India. Since then we’ve hired a country manager in India and we continue to grow at a rapid clip in that part of the world. We also recently added our 6 millionth LinkedIn member there, which seemed like perfect timing for a blog Q&A with Hari V. Krishnan, our country manager in India.
JM: You opened the India office about 6 months ago. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned?
HK: With a country this large and diverse, we need to constantly invest in understanding our users better – this ranges from our end users to our advertisers and recruiters (for e.g.). That’s job 1, 2 and 3. Our team has also spent a lot of time in India this past year understanding the market, our potential partners and feedback from our members.
JM: India just passed 6 million members and remains one of the fastest growing member bases in the LinkedIn network. What’s driving this?
HK: Culturally, professionals in India have always valued a strong professional network. In a hyper-competitive global economy, no one wants to miss an opportunity and I think people are seeing the possibilities with social networking. Don’t get me wrong, we have a lot of work to do to make LinkedIn indispensable to the Indian work force – but we’re headed in the right direction.
JM: How many Indian members will it take to hit a tipping point?
HK: Jeff likes to say that our ultimate goal is to connect all of the world’s professionals. My job is to connect the millions of professionals from India and help them be successful.
JM: Are you opening a technology center in Bangalore?
HK: (Laughs) That’s been the formula for dotcoms, hasn’t it?
We’re focused in understanding our end users’ needs better, as well as developing our marketing and hiring solutions businesses in India. We rely on our product and engineering teams in the Bay Area for developing the platform and maybe some day we’ll have our own tech teams in India. But it’s not our immediate focus.
JM: What about launching a site in Hindi?
HK: Local language is a critical part of our localization efforts around the world. We’ve recently launched in Portuguese and Italian – and both have spurred strong adoption by members.
That said, the language of business in most Indian markets is English. That’s the primary market demand and we need to listen to it.
JM: The Indian work force is among the youngest in the world. Do you have any advice to the early jobbers just cutting their teeth?
HK: Building long-term business connections and relationships starts on day 1 of your career and can be the key to sustained success. Professional networking sites such as LinkedIn affords you not only the most effective way to find a job but also be great at that job while building your professional brand in the process. I always urge users to check out our learning center for more tips.
JM: What can we expect from you and LinkedIn India towards the end of the year?
HK: We’ve added some great talent to the team in India over the last several months. With this team in place driving our business lines and managing our partners, you can expect us to get more involved with our user community at a grassroots level. We hope to do more meet ups with our members and customers in India at all key business centers in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and beyond.
JM: Really?
HK: Really. I’ve got my credit card ready. I look forward to checking out all the cool coffee shops around the country with fellow LinkedIn members!
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Over 6 million LinkedIn members in India and counting…
How Philips engages with the global healthcare community on LinkedIn
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Ed. note: Last week in London, Philips’ Global Director of Online Hans Notenboom spoke with LinkedIn’s Kevin Eyres at UK’s largest marketing event, Marketing Week Live. Their presentation offered a sneak peak into how Philips uses LinkedIn as a platform to engage with their audience in the healthcare sector in innovative new ways. Here, Kevin and Hans discuss some of the key themes and background to the partnership.
Kevin Eyres (KE): Tell us a bit more about the marketing strategy at Philips
Hans Notenboom (HN): As a company, Philips aims to look beyond simply what our technologies can do, and think about how we can improve people’s lives through innovation. Part of this is listening to our customers and the wider community to better understand the challenges they face and where we can improve what we do to stay relevant. A major part of our business is healthcare technology and the more we looked at building a platform to engage with professionals in this industry, the more we realised this community already existing on LinkedIn.
KE: How does LinkedIn benefit your audience in the healthcare industry?
HN: Healthcare professionals around the world discuss the latest technological developments with their peers and colleagues every day. With LinkedIn, we can bring these thousands of conversations happening worldwide onto one platform. Doctors from India to the US to Germany can now share insights and experience in an environment where we play the facilitator in an unobtrusive way. This is vital for ensuring the conversation stays focused and flows easily, delivering real benefits to our audience.
KE: What were the key decisions in getting to this stage?
HN: With the “Innovations in Health” LinkedIn group, we’ve taken a significant step in a new direction for our business-to-business marketing in moving part of that engagement off of our own website. Part of the drive behind that is the realisation that in the future 95% of the online engagement with our customers will happen off our own website. Ignoring that fact would have been a mistake and we now have an opportunity to have conversations with the five million healthcare professionals on LinkedIn in an environment that they are comfortable in and trust.
KE: What role does the issue of trust play in this for Philips?
HN: When it comes to any part of business, but especially something like healthcare, trust is paramount. LinkedIn is your professional identity, meaning the contribution you make is highly likely to be thoughtful and insightful. This is the environment we wanted to create to ensure its usefulness for members. If you don’t add value with these engagement efforts then you won’t get people coming back, and this is a long term investment for us. We’re still in the early stages but already seeing a great level of engagement among the group’s 11,000 plus members and this is increasing daily.
KE: What would be your top three tips for brands looking to engage their audiences through social media?
HN: Firstly, this is not a short term project. Social media needs to be an ongoing, integrated element of your communications with the outside world and your marketing strategy to be genuine. Secondly, context is king. Think about the type of message you want to get to your audience and the right time to do this. Since we’re focused in the professional space, Linkedin was the best choice. For other brands social networks might be more appropriate. Finally, moderation is very important. We took the decision to use well-known names in the sector to help us with this and it’s helped keep the conversations relevant and valuable for the members.
KE: Any early insights you can share?
HN: The group is already proving successful in bringing the right professionals together to have in-depth and valuable conversations about their respective fields. The group numbers and engagement have far exceeded our forecasts and we’re excited about the new elements we’ll be bringing in over the next weeks and months.
Note: Innovations in Health is the first of a series of groups Philips will be hosting on LinkedIn, each relevant to a specific sector. For more information on the opportunities for brands to engage the global professional community on LinkedIn, please visit our dedicated Marketing Solution site.
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How Philips engages with the global healthcare community on LinkedIn
LinkedIn, Apache Pig, and Open Source
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Code Alert! This is a part of our continuing series on Engineering at LinkedIn. If this isn’t your cup of Java, check back tomorrow for regular LinkedIn programming. In the meanwhile, check out some of our latest product features, tips and tricks, or user stories. - Ed.
One of the reasons I joined LinkedIn Analytics is its commitment to open source. At LinkedIn, we love open source. We’re committed to contributing to Hadoop and Pig and giving back to the open source community through projects like Azkaban and Voldemort. We are determined to provide the open source community with the complete and painless data cycle that we enjoy – to enable even casual hadoop users to analyze data from their application at scale, to mine it for value and store it easily and reliably so that it can drive use and close the data loop. Look for new open source tools and projects from LinkedIn Analytics in the coming months that will help make this possible!
Hadoop drives many of our most powerful features at LinkedIn. About half of our Hadoop jobs are submitted by Apache Pig. This means that along with Azkaban and Voldemort, Pig is a large part of LinkedIn’s data cycle – the process behind features like People You May Know and Who Viewed My Profile.
LinkedIn and Apache Pig
I have used Pig intensively for about a year. During that time, I have come to love Pig for what it enables me to do: easily manipulate my data at scale, to turn raw data into data products. If Perl is the duct tape of the internet, and Hadoop is the kernel of the data center as computer, then Pig is the duct tape of Big Data. Pig lets me easily flow my data in parallel with simple commands. It lets me flow my data through dynamic languages like Python if I want to use SciPy, through simple UDFs in Java if I want to use a function repeatedly and share it with others, and ILLUSTRATE lets me check the output of my lengthy batch jobs and their custom functions without having to do a lengthy run of a long pipeline. Taken together, these features enable me to be productive.
I learned Pig not because I had a big data problem, but because I wanted to build a better interface for Hadoop (see: PigPen, WireIT, this demo video). For a long time, I did not delve very deeply. There was no reason to do so: I didn’t have to know how to code in MapReduce – Pig ‘just worked.’ I issue SQLish commands in Pig Latin, and Pig parses these commands and creates and submits MapReduce jobs for me. This saves me from having to think too hard about the complexity of Java, MapReduce or Hadoop. I don’t like to think about anything but the problem I’m actually solving, and so while I have written Algebraic MapReduce jobs as Pig UDFs, I am unlikely to ever write a Java Hadoop job unless I absolutely have to.
Apache Pig is now fairly robust, but data-flows themselves can get complex fast. I’m pretty fluent in Pig Latin, but my code in any language rarely runs on the first try. With batch computing, running jobs repeatedly to debug them can take a long time and slow development to a crawl. One must often massage the Pig to command its will.
When I write Pig Latin code beyond a dozen lines, I check it in stages:
- Write Pig Latin in TextMate (Saved in a git repo, otherwise I lose code)
- Paste the code into the Grunt shell – Did it parse?
- DESCRIBE the final output and each complex step – Did it still parse? Is the schema what I expected?
- ILLUSTRATE the output – Does it still parse? Is the schema ok? Is the example data ok?
- SAMPLE / LIMIT / DUMP the output – Does it still parse? Is the schema ok? Is the sampled/limited data sane?
- STORE the final output and see if the job completes.
- cat output_dir/part-00000 (followed by a quick ctrl-c to stop the flood) – Is the stored output on HDFS ok?
When you first tackle a complex task with Pig, that last step rarely happens on the first few tries. In time, you get more proficient.
As an incurious Pig user, I thought of Pig as a black box: a program with a command line. Nevertheless, I got to know the idiosyncrasies of each version as Pig matured from version 0.2 to 0.7 – unfixed bugs, unusual behaviors, and undocumented limitations. I never knew exactly why Pig behaved as it did, but I learned to get along with it.
Working on Pig
Several months ago I decided to work on the Pig project and I’m going after low hanging fruit the committers haven’t gotten around to and leaving the tough bits to them. Log analysis is a common use of Pig, and logs usually contain timestamps, so I want to add a Joda-Time DateTime data type to Pig.
But that is way too hard, so I’m going after boolean first. I checked out the code. I worked on it all weekend. I made a patch. I made many patches, actually. Time and again, I thought I was done, but I wasn’t. Booleans would load in grunt, so I thought it worked – but they wouldn’t store. I added physical storage code, so I could load and store. I emailed the LinkedIn Hadoop users list proclaiming victory… but it wouldn’t work on Hadoop. So I added Hadoop storage code, and it would load and store on Hadoop – but I couldn’t use operators to check for equality. I added code for ILLUSTRATE and it would illustrate, but I still couldn’t use booleans in a real job. This went on and on, and remains a work in progress.
During that weekend of long and frustrating hours of Pig hacking, the pattern became familiar. I was interacting with a different part of Pig each time I got a new kind of error. The hops from package to package in writing the patch corresponded to the stages of my long hours of stepwise data-flow checks in Grunt, as I had written Pig scripts most days over the course of the last year.
From a user’s perspective using the Grunt shell, this system seems like a cohesive entity – a single program – a complete (and somewhat irrational) Pig. It doesn’t seem that way anymore. Now that I’ve read the code, using Grunt is different. Knowing the way it all fits together at a high level – by tracing exceptions and seeing the package names of classes I’ve failed to implement because I didn’t know they existed or were required – I know that pig is actually segmented into many logical parts, independent arms that verify and process Pig Latin code independently and in different ways. The interface presented by grunt presents an illusion of wholeness that a deeper understanding of pig makes transparent – clear as illusion.
The Data Revolution
For me, understanding my work over the last year by understanding Pig was profound. It gave it more meaning, because strangely enough Pig has become a big part of my life. I’ve never much contributed to open source before, and I’m glad to be transitioning from a passive consumer of other people’s work to an active participant in an open source project. It is good to create openly, to give back. Open source is technical righteousness.
But more than that, this is an important time in computer science, and unlike many previous technical revolutions, this one is happening completely in the open. Like the integrated circuit before it, MapReduce is producing a paradigm shift that opens broad opportunities to produce new kinds of products from our massive collective backlog of data to help people in new and unprecedented ways. At LinkedIn we’ve amassed the world’s premiere data-set on the labor of professionals, and it is the mission of LinkedIn Analytics to leverage that deeply meaningful data to provide insight and value to our users. At LinkedIn Analytics data processing is both personal and meaningful, as the features we create enhance the working lives of tens of millions of people.
The Integrated Circuit solved the Tyranny of Numbers and unleashed Moore’s law, enabling a computerized, networked society. It did so with the considerable overhead of patent licensing and litigation. MapReduce is solving the Tyranny of Threads, enabling any company to process data at scale in parallel to extract real value from our most abundant and underutilized resource: information. It is doing it in the open, through free and open-source software, through the Apache Foundation, Hadoop and its sub-projects. We’ve gotten more efficient organizationally this time around.
If you love open source and you love big, meaningful data – we need you. Come join us. LinkedIn Analytics is hiring!
(Shout outs to Pete Skomoroch for acting as late-night editor, helping me dramatically improve this post!)
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LinkedIn, Apache Pig, and Open Source
Greater Access and More Profile Data for Developers
Posted by: | CommentsCode Alert! This is a part of our continuing series for Developers at LinkedIn, syndicated from our Developer blog. If this isn’t your cup of code, check back next week for regular LinkedIn programming. Check out some of the partner integrations we announced earlier this year. And, if you are a developer please visit our Developer Network site.
The LinkedIn Open API program has been live for 6 months now and after watching what you are building and what you need, we are announcing a wide variety of new features that target three of the most common requests and needs our developers have asked for.
A vastly improved Search API that lets developers search and also process a great amount of analytical data on LinkedIn came out two weeks ago. That will let developers build much more powerful search experiences on your site using the LinkedIn API. Major request fulfilled.
Today, we’re announcing another set of major improvements to developers’ experience of working with the LinkedIn platform: higher throttles where you need them most, and greater access to profile data.
Higher Throttles
We’ve made two key changes to throttles that will make it easier to develop and test developers’ applications:
Higher Search Throttles
We’ve increased the Search API throttle by 400%. The search throttle is now 100 searches per user per day. This should accommodate most use cases very well.
Higher Throttles for Developers
While you are developing your application, it’s hard to build and test without hitting some of the user throttles. Effective immediately, when you are listed as a developer on an API key, your throttle will be 4 times higher than the published user throttles for most calls. We think this is the right number, but we will be watching and listening and will respond further if necessary.
It’s important to remember that while the higher developer throttles apply to you as a developer of the application, they don’t apply to your users. Be careful not to build features that require the higher throttles to work. These higher developer throttles are there to help you develop and test applications.
Greater Access to Profile Data
In the past, we’ve returned two versions of profiles:
- For your users who grant you access, you get the fully detailed profile
- For everyone else, we return the current job information only
Effective now, you will get the full profile details for users who grant you access (no change there) and also for those user’s connections as well. This matches the site more closely and lets you present deeper insights to your users.
To access this data, simply include the fields you want in the call.
For full details on the fields you get for each user, check the Profile Fields doc.
…Oh, And One More Thing: Full Recommendation Text on Profiles
Starting today, you can also get the text of recommendations for a profile. This was a long standing request and we’re happy to get it out. You will be able to get the full text of recommendations for users who grant you access and their first degree connections. We’ll look to expand this to all profiles soon.
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Greater Access and More Profile Data for Developers
Welcome to a whole new way of experiencing LinkedIn Groups
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Starting today, we’re rolling out some updates to LinkedIn groups – the first major update since we launched discussions in Groups at the end of August 2009. This is the first of upcoming upgrades to our groups’ platform, conversation system, and moderation toolkit coming shortly. Please bear in mind that these updates will be rolled out over the next week, by when you should see these feature updates applied to your groups.
Here’s a quick video that walks you through the key features you can expect from the new LinkedIn Groups. More details after the jump.
What’s different in LinkedIn Groups today?
1. An improved look and feel
We’ve made the conversations within groups similar to face-to-face professional interactions by removing the wall between original remarks and off-site content such as shared news articles. The rich link-sharing experience you already enjoy on your LinkedIn homepage is now also available within the context of groups.
Even better is the ability to easily recognize the participants of a conversation by linking to individual profile pictures that makes the experience more personal. It also brings to your finger tips profile information of the professional participating in that discussion.
2. Ease of use
The new design makes it easy to browse through the latest updates of a discussion and make comments quickly and easily. You can roll over the images of the last three participants on any thread to see comment previews and click their profile pictures to jump to their segment of the conversation.
Alternatively, you can chime in right away by commenting in line without drilling down into the whole discussion. If you’re new to the thread, clicking the discussion headline or the “See all comments” link will take you to the beginning of the discussion.
3. Surfacing the most popular and recent discussions in a group – faster
A key part of the new groups experience is the democratization of discussions, as group members actively curate the conversations that will be seen by the group. This is most obvious in the carousel of new content – original posts, RSS items, and off-site links shared by group members – that can be voted up or down by any group member.
This feature allows users to quickly peruse new content and vote either by “liking” or commenting on discussions they deem worthy of the group’s attention. Users who prefer to see all discussions sorted chronologically can just click on the “See all new discussions” link on the homepage.
In a live discussion, nodding fuels a conversation and the new “Like” button is a simple way to do this virtually. You can also see who has liked a conversation to get a sense for topics that group members are gravitating toward. The “More” drop-down in the carousel also makes it easy to flag new items as a job or as inappropriate for the group.
4. Making it easier for you to receive email updates from select group members
While you may check in to groups ever so often to get the latest news and discussions from your fellow group members, you may also like to set up a persistent email alert when select members of the group make a contribution (like or comment) within the group. This is easily accomplished by clicking through the “Start following” icon below each profile photo in any group thread on the groups homepage.
5. Shining a spotlight on users who add most value to the group each week
Finally, the new groups interface introduces an easy way to discover participants who truly drive the activity of the group’s discussions each week by highlighting them as “top influencers”. This designation is given not only to those who contribute the most, but also to those whose contributions stimulate the most participation from other group members.
Members who are highly regarded and heavily followed in the group often play a key role in stoking the conversation with their comments and Likes even if they don’t start a thread. Of course, the authors of popular threads are often the most influential.
We’re all about nurturing the professional conversation, and we hope the changes to LinkedIn Groups will make it even easier for you to contribute and participate in a professional groups setting. We’d love to hear your feedback, so please feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this post or @linkedin us on Twitter.
Filed under: Best Of, Groups, New LinkedIn Features 
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Welcome to a whole new way of experiencing LinkedIn Groups
How can we help the people affected by the current disaster in the Gulf?
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Ed. note: This is a guest post from best-selling author, adjunct Professor at Kellogg School of Management and senior scientist with The Gallup Organization – Deepak Chopra. Deepak just asked his LinkedIn network to share ideas on how we can help the people affected by the current disaster in the Gulf. Here are his thoughts on the topic. The toxic oil spill in the Gulf is heartbreaking and so massive that it cannot be overlooked. But thirty years ago the pioneering ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau reported that every square mile of the world’s oceans is covered with a thin film of oil. It’s barely visible, if at all, but it’s there. Because there are seemingly endless stretches of ocean — just as there seemed to be endless stretches of ice at the poles — human beings could afford to pretend that we aren’t living on a spaceship.
That time is at an end. Technology will eventually bring us an end to fossil fuels. Water diversion can bring drinking water to the overcrowded cities where clean, potable water is quickly running out (several in India, including Mumbai, are reaching the critical point). Genetic therapies may one day bring down cancer rates by more than a trifling amount. In other words, if you are an optimist, the hazards of climate change and overpopulation are waiting for solutions that will one day emerge, hopefully sooner than later.
But what kind of a solution is it to survive on a toxic planet? This is like telling a patient that he is well because he’s not about to die. We need to adopt a new kind of consciousness in which the wellness of Spaceship Earth is true wellness, not simply the absence of potentially fatal conditions. Right now, we face the potential for ecological disaster on many fronts, from the melting glaciers of the Himalayas that threaten to dislocate millions of refugees to the rising seas that could submerge the Maldives and dying coral reefs all over the globe.
Our choice is to stand back and passively let bad go to worse, or we could become active stewards of the planet. A new consciousness involves networking and group efforts. It involves political influence and the development of new leadership. But all activity begins in consciousness first; you must be aware enough to look reality in the face. We aren’t doing that except in fits and starts. Overwhelmed by bad news on the ecological front for more than a decade, all of us find it easier to shut down and tune out. The alternative seems like emotional numbness. But there’s another alternative, the invigorating, energizing call to action that leads to personal fulfillment and empowerment.
Healing this planet would be empowering for all of us. What won’t empower us is sitting at the sickbed watching Mother Nature grow sicker until signs of death appear. Planetary wellness needs to become a global movement, yet it begins with you and me, and the time to act is now.
How can we help the people affected by the current disaster in the Gulf?
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How can we help the people affected by the current disaster in the Gulf?
Meet your new LinkedIn Inbox
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As the hub of professional conversation on the web, LinkedIn wants to make sure you have an efficient Inbox that improves your productivity. It’s a place where you can quickly and easily manage messages from your connections and invitation requests from colleagues and classmates.
Recently, we started rolling out our new Inbox to some of our members and soon all of you will be seeing it (if you haven’t already). Check out a 1 minute video to see some of these enhancements.
Highlights of the Inbox upgrade include:
Here are your oft requested features that will be incorporated into your LinkedIn Inbox moving forward. Thanks for your feedback and comments.
1. New look and feel: Inbox and module on home page are now redesigned to be simpler and more intuitive. We’ve separated invitations and messages into two separate tabs making it easier for you to view and respond to your pending invitations.
2. Bulk actions: You can now archive a number of similar messages at once, making your Inbox even easier to maintain and control. You can also bulk accept or ignore invitations making connecting with others a snap.
3. Delete: The top request from our users was the ability to delete messages. Done and done.
This is just one more step in improving your LinkedIn Inbox experience. We hope you enjoy your new Inbox.
And we invite you to continue sending us any feedback. Please feel free to leave a comment on this post or @linkedin us on Twitter.
Filed under: LinkedIn Announcements 
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Meet your new LinkedIn Inbox
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