Another quick roundup from the world of social networking over the past few weeks. Before we get into the specific articles, many of you may have read the post by Adam Nash about LinkedIn’s involvement in Open Social, and today we have a video of the LinkedIn Open Social presentation that Adam made at the Google Campfire event (04:30)

Here are three other topics that encompassed LinkedIn themes these past few weeks, starting off with a Nielsen Netratings’ report that highlighted LinkedIn as the fastest growing social network:

1. Fastest growing social networking site | Fortune

The blogosphere gravitated towards a Nielsen Netratings report (via Fortune), which covered the fastest growing social networks (year over year). Here’s a sampling of blogs on that topic:

* Web Pro News

Quick, what’s the fastest-growing social network over the last year?

MySpace?  Nope.  Facebook?  Nope.  Bebo?  Now, let’s be serious.  According to Nielsen Online (and Fortune), it’s . . . LinkedIn.

* Marketing Shift

While Facebook has been getting most of the attention of developers, LinkedIn’s involvement in OpenSocial with Google et al. will foster creation of new application to help business folk advance themselves and their companies.

Maybe it’s my age (okay, yes it is my age), but I prefer to keep my social circle focused on people who I really know and do my socializing through email or on the phone with my expanded circle of friends and colleagues.

2. LinkedIn CEOs Straw Poll | USA Today

Did you know that there are currently 145, 000 CEOs on LinkedIn. When polled on their political choices for Elections 08, here’s what USA Today found:

None of the 154 CEOs who responded to USA TODAY’s survey said that they typically voted Democratic but intended to vote Republican in 2008.

Still, Giuliani was the favorite. He also won in a scientific survey of small-business owners by payroll-processing company SurePayroll and a much larger unscientific survey of more than 2,000 CEOs by Vistage International, which says it’s the world’s largest CEO membership organization. LinkedIn, which says it has 145,000 CEOs signed up, found Clinton in the lead in a small, unscientific response.

Vistage allowed its CEOs to vote undecided, which carried the day with 37%, followed by Giuliani (21%), Romney (11%), Clinton (9%) and Obama (7%). LinkedIn CEOs casting 446 votes online were 47% Republican and 44% Democratic. Of those, Clinton received 29% of the votes to 18% for Giuliani and 16% for Obama.

3. International News | Telegraph and the Guardian

Here are a couple of articles featuring Reid Hoffman’s trip to Europe, which covers the

a. Reid’s advice to entrepreneurs | Telegraph

His advice to entrepreneurs is simply: “actually go and do it!”. Websites are much cheaper now to build, he said, and once you hit a ’spark’, it can quickly turn into a forest fire. Base your
innovations on cultural needs and focus on adding new tools – “if you don’t add anything new, then – bang!”.

And he should know – after leaving PayPal in October 2002, he assembled a team to start on LinkedIn in November.

“I couldn’t take a holiday”, Mr Hoffman said, “Venture finance thought the web was dead back then, but I thought networking sites were going to be big.

“I wanted to go one step further: finance the social networking sites, and start building the professional networking sites.”

LinkedIn is now the largest professional networking site in the UK, with 1m users. It has a high calibre of members too – senior executives for 96 of the FTSE 100 companies have their own LinkedIn profile pages.

In the US, all of the Fortune 500 companies have an executive level presence.

b. Silicon Valley comes to Oxford | Guardian

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman said that the discussion about a new web bubble is usually too simplified. Costs of hardware, software and bandwidth are all far less this time around, and the ad market online is far greater. “There will be some trough and companies being corrected, but relatively few. The pace of development is now so fast that we’re seeing the next wave of disruption starting before the last has kicked in.”

I’m back! (check out my recent feature post here) and this time it’s to announce a bunch of upcoming feature updates in categories as diverse as Network Updates to Messaging. Before we get into the nitty gritty of each of the four feature refinements, here’s an overview that Ruslan and I provided Mario, our community guy, yesterday:

Let’s start with the new feature you haven’t seen before

1. Personal Notes | One-to-one messaging

How many times have you thought, it’d be nice to message your connections on LinkedIn directly without having to open up your email client. Well, now that’s exactly what you’ll be able to do. For e.g. let’s assume you’re browsing the profile of a connection of yours that you’d like to message.

Notice the “Send a message” button. By clicking that you’ll notice a popup message box that allows you to directly message Molly.

Alternatively, you’ll also be able to compose messages directly from the Inbox as well.

2. Network Updates | Chronological arrangement

Starting today, you’ll also notice that your network updates are arranged chronologically, to make it easier for you to understand what it is that your peers and colleagues are up to within your professional universe. If you’d like to explore the Updates further, go through “See more Network Updates” link to a page with the updates archived on a weekly basis.

3. Yahoo! Web Mail Importer (In addition to Gmail and AOL)

One of the important ways to start leveraging the benefits of a social network is to upload your email contacts into LinkedIn. Thus far, we’ve been providing web mail import of Gmail and AOL and now you can also upload your Yahoo! Mail contacts with LinkedIn. Also, for all you Outlook fans, we’ve got our LinkedIn Outlook toolbar, which you can download here.

4. Groups

You may have read of the recent upgrades to LinkedIn Groups that Benjamin Guthrie outlined in an earlier post here. In this release, Ben and team just made joining a group on LinkedIn a little bit easier. Whenever you see a group logo on a person’s profile, you are now able to request to join the group by clicking on the logo. Your request to join will then go into a queue for the manager of the group to approve or decline.

Create your group today!

Please let us know what you think of the above features and provide us any feedback by leaving a comment on the blog.

Well, we’re not exactly breaking new ground, per se.  But we are kicking off the demolition and construction of the new 1st floor of our building.  For fun, we let a number of people pitch in and help out with the beginning of demolition.  Check out the video below for a sample of some good, old-fashioned sledge hammer swings.

LinkedIn is growing, and we’re expanding into a new space dedicated to our rock star product & engineering teams.

We’re going to be building out the space to create a environment really optimized for our great engineers, product managers, web developers, designers and quality engineers to all sit and work together.  Very high energy, with a lot of thought given to providing the best possible place to design & build the features for the world’s largest professional network.

When the space is done in a couple of months, we’ll have room for another 120-150 people, and we’ll post pictures of the launch.  But as a teaser, here is a quick 3D rendering of the type of stations we’re planning for the space:

By the way, if you are looking for a great position in architecture, engineering or product, LinkedIn is hiring.  One of these new spots could be for you! :)

I know we’d promised you the video from our most recent LinkedIn Q&A event – Confessions of Fake Steve Jobs with Guy Kawasaki (and a surprise guest!). Although, we don’t have the entire video, we’ve got something better. We’ve broken down the video into it’s funniest bits and are providing you the links right below. None of these videos are longer than 3.5 minutes, so they make for quick humorous bytes for the day.

If you find the above video funny, here’s more:

* The Genesis of the Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ) blog (03:29)

* Brad Stone (New York Times) describes how he outed Fake Steve Jobs (03:22)

* Does FSJ hide from Walt Mossberg and Robert Scoble? (03:30)

* The phenomenon of Fake celebrity blogs & why Ballmer is difficult to parody? (3:33)

* Did being outed as FSJ help the blog? (01:04)

* Was FSJ’s identity leaked intentionally? (03:04)

* FSJ takes a dig at Valleywag and talks of parent company, Forbes (02:25)

Also, stay tuned for the Q&A session with the audience coming up shortly. And, we’ll be uploading the entire video soon.

Which of the above videos do you think is the funniest?

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—
About Dan Lyons:

Dan Lyons (Senior editor at Forbes) well known tech blogger of the Fake Steve Jobs blog, was on a book tour to promote his recently released book “Option$”:

“Options” is the outgrowth of a blog that Mr. Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes and a novelist, started in the summer of 2006, at fakesteve.blogspot.com. The book weaves the blog’s greatest hits into a cohesive narrative that enfolds recent events at Apple, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into alleged accounting irregularities (backdated options), and the release of the iPhone. (Source: New York Times)

Thanks!

We’d like to once again thank Guy Kawasaki for moderating the entertaining and informative LinkedIn Q&A Session and Brad Stone for his participation. And, of course, the event wouldn’t have been a success without Fake Steve Jobs himself who is as entertaining in person as he is on his blog.

Here’s a very quick update on the LinkedIn Q&A event held recently at the Computer History Museum. Stay tuned for the entire video presentation of the event, coming up shortly right here on the blog.

We had a little over 300 attendees for the 2 hour laugh riot, which featured author (Options)/blogger (Fake Steve Jobs blog)/Senior editor (Forbes) — Dan Lyons. Despite facing a barrage of questions ranging from the genesis of the blog to the drama of being outed as Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ), Dan managed to entertain with his quick wit and along the way revealed some interesting episodes from his new book “Option$” (out in book stores now).

(Images from the LinkedIn Q&A Event featuring Guy Kawasaki and Dan Lyons | Source: LinkedIn’s Photo Feed)

We kicked off the event with a few quick words from Dan Nye, our CEO, and then let Guy Kawasaki grill Dan Lyons on his numerous fake shenanigans! To make matters more interesting, we invited a surprise guest Brad Stone from the New York Times (NYT) to join them on stage. Those of you familiar with the FSJ saga, will recognize Brad as the “world’s greatest investigative reporter“, who outed Fake Steve Jobs in a much publicized NYT post almost three months ago.

Stay tuned for the video of the entertaining evening that we’ll be sharing with you shortly on the blog (Subscribe)! In the meanwhile, here’s some coverage of the event:

1. Pictures from the event
2. A quick recap
3. Post-event interviews with Guy and Dan

Thanks!
We’d like to thank the Computer History Museum (Valerie Alston), the folks over at Lunch 2.0 (Mark Jen and Terry Chay), Giving 2.0 (Stephanie Trimble) and uStream (Brad Hunstable) for their support. Stay tuned to the blog for more LinkedIn Events!

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Last week on this post we left with you with a question asked by Karl Long, Social Media Integration Manager at Nokia on LinkedIn Answers where he answered a question on how one can make blogs more enjoyable. Given below is the question followed by answers found both on LinkedIn Answers as well as across the blogosphere on the same topic:

Karl Long, responds to a question on LinkedIn Answers via his blog:

Someone on LinkedIn just posed this question “How can one make blogs more enjoyable or What is that you do to maintain the popularity/readership of your blog?“. Here are my thoughts on this, this may not be all that leads to a successful blog, but these are for me pretty essential ingredients: Focus, Passion, and Originality.

Here’s the original question:

And, here’s Karl’s response that was chosen as Best Answer:

Focus – I think one of the most important choices a blogger makes when they start their blog is what their focus is. Think about a first time visitor getting dropped on your blog from a search engine or stumbleupon, are they going to understand in 2 seconds exactly what your blog is about? If the answer is yes you will build a readership and you will have a successful blog. If not, you may well build a successful blog but it will take years as opposed to months.

Passion – This is the only possible way that you will be able to sustain regular posting of a high enough quality over the course of years. If you don’t have the passion your blog will become a ghost town very quickly. People talk about the passion in the writing, and how important it is for readers, but IMHO the passion is all about the ability to sustain you through the emotional roller coaster ride of writing a blog. Sure your passion will come through in your writing, but it is your passion that will keep you plugging away when no one is coming back, no one is commenting, and no one is linking to you. Passion may not be the only thing that will drag you along, but it is the most enjoyable so unless you are a masochist you better love what
your talking about.

Originality – In branding terms, what differentiates you from the crowded playing field of blogs all talking about the same thing. They don’t call the blogosphere an echo chamber for nothing, because most of the time everyone is reflecting and amplifying what else is happening around the blogosphere. Original content and original ideas in the blogosphere stand out like beacons in the night, and not to labor the metaphor but they also attract other bloggers like moths to a flame :-)

Other’s seem to also triangulate on three key factors, like

Primary focus is content (still King). As Kathie wrote: I write about subject I’m passionate about, I consider worthy to notify and share.

Second: publish frequently. If you’re not planning to write posts on a regularly basis, you forget your audience. They’ll not take your blog seriously.

Third: make yourself known to search engines, RSS aggregators, listings, social networks, fellow bloggers.

Or Ajay Jain, who referred to a recent article he’d crafted for the Mint, a business daily published in India by The Hindustan Times in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, where he outlines the key factors that enable blogging:

Quantity does not beat quality: While frequent postings may help you go up the search rankings, don’t do it for the sake of doing so. Ask yourself if anyone would care to read what you are writing. Post once or twice a week if need be but ensure it is quality writing. You don’t want to turn away readers or bury your good pieces under the debris.

Is it unique? Unless the first blog Rip Van Winkle goes to after waking up is yours, your content is valuable only if it is unique. Search engines such as Google can now catch those who copy content from other sources. Spooky, but true. “A combination of originality and quality works beautifully—it takes you higher up on the search engines,” says Lalwani.

Is your content ‘buzzworthy’?
It can be if you offer scoops or write controversial stuff—but be careful and don’t go over the top. A positive buzz will get people talking about you and send links and traffic your way.

Are you a blogger? If so, how do you maintain the popularity of your blog?