LinkedIn News: Your company's professional watercooler

The last blog post on LinkedIn News, a few weeks ago, covered some of the sharing capabilities that we introduced. With this week’s release, we’re introducing some new features that should make “LinkedIn News” a more valuable resource for keeping up to date on the latest and greatest news about your company.

There are two important advancements in LinkedIn News today. Here are quick snapshots of what those differences are:

1. Surfacing most relevant information

We know that most business professionals don’t have time to scour hundreds of news articles during their busy workday.  You want to quickly find the news your colleagues are reading today so you can keep up with the office water cooler conversations.  The “Most Activity” section of LinkedIn News promotes the most interesting articles your colleagues are reading, sharing, and discussing on LinkedIn.

We also want to make it easier for you to consume information at a glance before you decide to either read it or discuss it with your peers from your company.

2. News Discussion within your company

Yes, that's right. This latest iteration of LinkedIn News features the ability to discuss popular news articles with everyone within your company. In essence, this version of LinkedIn News has the potential to be the online version of the company watercooler where you get to discuss articles of interest in your professional spheres (company, industry, etc...)

One thing that sets LinkedIn News apart from more traditional community-driven news sites is that our news discussions always take place within your semi-private company group. Any news discussion started on LinkedIn will only be visible to co-workers who’ve been confirmed to work at your company. This secure discussion environment will hopefully encourage the sharing of candid and insightful commentary amongst colleagues you work with everyday.

3. Discussion Network Updates

Of course, a discussion isn’t going to be very interesting if nobody knows it’s happening! Whenever you create a discussion or comment on a LinkedIn News article, we’ll notify your LinkedIn connections that work at your company, asking them to join the discussion.  These notifications will show up in your colleagues Network Updates feed on their LinkedIn home page.

More to come…

Be on the lookout for more features as LinkedIn continues to build out its News and Groups feature set. Thanks to the following great engineers for their help in building News Discussions: Armin Ahumada, Oscar Chan, Chris Saccheri, and Scott Schlegel and Eishay Smith.

--
We've also read your comments in the last blog post on LinkedIn News and we've addressed some of the concerns. Please continue leaving comments either below this blog post or for a more immediate response feel free to reach out to Mario, our community evangelist.