Continuing our series of posts on how LinkedIn has made a difference in users’ careers, let’s focus our attention today on the advertising industry. Dave Smith is the CEO of Mediasmith, a media planning and buying agency, who found two of his biggest clients on LinkedIn.

Here’s what Mediasmith does (via LinkedIn Company Profiles)

The company offers emerging technologies consulting and implementation, search engine marketing and search engine optimization, media consulting, and audience development consulting and implementation services. It operates through TV, radio, print, out-of-home, and interactive media in the United States and internationally. The company was founded in 1989 and is based in San Francisco, California.

… see more

LinkedIn User Snapshot

Who: Dave Smith, CEO of Mediasmith (San Francisco)

How: Imagine finding two of your biggest clients on LinkedIn, one of which turns out to be your single biggest piece of income. That was Dave’s experience on LinkedIn, largely enabled by how he used LinkedIn. Hear him describe it in his own words below.

LinkedIn Tip from Dave

Using LinkedIn’s WebMail Importer

• Use webmail import to see, in seconds, all the people you know who are already on LinkedIn. You can then select who you wish to invite to join your trusted network.
• Upload a contacts file from Outlook, Palm, ACT!, or Mac Address
• View our list of your colleagues and classmates that are already on LinkedIn.

(Source: LinkedIn Learning Center)

On Tuesday, Brad Neuberg from Google’s Developer Program visited LinkedIn’s headquarters in Mountain View to give a presentation on Gears to the engineering department as part of our series of LinkedIn Tech Talks.

Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, and provides for a better user experience with a cross-browser plugin. Gears gets installed on a user’s machine (the same way any other plugin like Adobe Acrobat Reader does), and then provides a local database, worker pool, and a local web server.

The database is a full-featured SQLite DB which provides SQL queries, views, triggers, full text search, and the ability to store gigs of user data locally. The local server can allow you to run web apps offline by storing HTML, CSS, images, etc., but in managed, versioned bundles which can be downloaded in the background, and it does not get cleared when the user clears the browser’s cache. Using it is much better than relying on the normal browser cache. The worker pool gives you the ability to send tasks for background processing off to Gears, so that JavaScript code can be run asynchronously without blocking the main script running in the browser. This is perfect for dealing with any number crunching, long DB queries, or communication with remote servers. Google has more information in their API docs.

Afterwards, Brad stayed around to discuss how different engineering groups at LinkedIn could use Gears to give our users a better user experience and more powerful features.

Although we don’t have Brad’s talk at LinkedIn online for you to see, here is another presentation on Gears that Brad gave at Google I/O 2008.

I’m impressed with Gears and some of the demos, and real applications like Remember The Milk that I’ve seen using it. I’m sure we could make use of this technology to dramatically improve the user experience for many LinkedIn users in areas like the homepage, network updates, address book, and corporate solutions.

NOTE: This entry was published with Brad Neuberg’s permission.

Guest Author – Matt Raible

Last week, I attended O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (a.k.a. OSCON) in Portland, Oregon. This was the 5th year I’ve attended (and spoke) at OSCON. I really like the diversity of open source projects and languages discussed at this conference. You can find always find good sessions on Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and even Java. Of the many sessions I attended, the ones I learned the most from were Google XML Pages by Harry Heymann and Laurence Gonsalves and Even Faster Web Sites (PPT) by Steve Souders. If you didn’t get a chance to attend OSCON this year, you might try watching OSCON in 37 minutes by Gregg Pollack. This is a video where Gregg asks many speakers to summarize their talks in 30 seconds or less.

On Wednesday, I presented my talk titled Web Frameworks of the Future: Flex, GWT, Grails and Rails. I was inspired to do this talk when I first heard of SOFEA (Service Oriented Front End Architecture) and SOUI (Service Oriented UI) last fall. These acronyms suggest the same type of architecture; one where the backend serves up data (via SOAP, REST, etc.) and the frontend handles page flow, navigation, etc. SOFEA was created by Ganesh Prasad, Rajat Taneja and Vikrant Todankar in their “Life Above the Service Tier” paper, while SOUI was created by Nolan Wright and Jeff Haynie in a couple of blog posts.

To do research for this talk, I created two different versions of the same application. One was with Flex and Rails and the other was with GWT and Grails. While I didn’t complete the application before the talk, I do plan on continuing to work on it in my spare time and will hopefully have something to show later this fall. The application I’m creating is called “Rich Resume” and will allow you to edit and publish your resume online quickly and easily. If everything goes well, I’ll add the ability to import your LinkedIn Profile to get started. As far as my progress on the application, I was able to finish both backends with Grails and Rails in under 25 hours. Both framework’s out-of-the-box dynamic scaffolding didn’t support one-to-many relationships very well, so I did have to tweak some things. With Rails, I was able to use ActiveScaffold to solve my issues. With Grails, I had to generate Controllers and then manually tweak them to add one-to-many and REST support.

As far as Flex and GWT, I found them both easy to get started with. I got bit early by GWT’s Same Origin Policy, which made it difficult to develop the frontend and backend on different hosts. After moving the GWT app into Grails (using the GWT Plugin), things went much smoother. I was disappointed to find that GWT doesn’t support REST too well, but there seems to be many folks that share this same sentiment and quite a few solutions are being developed (for example, Restlet-GWT). While Flex allows for cross-domain communication, I was disappointed to find it doesn’t support zero turnaround (save/refresh) outside of an IDE. I’m sure over the coming months, I’ll develop a greater sense of affection for these frameworks, but I also think it’s important to note first impressions.

Below is my presentation for your viewing pleasure.

In October, I’ll be presenting a similar talk at the Colorado Software Summit. This time, I’ll be using Appcelerator to build my Rich Resume application. It should be a good show, especially since my colleagues Yan Pujante and Ikai Lan will be speaking. If you want to learn about how they’ve enhanced LinkedIn’s applications and architecture, you won’t want to miss their talks.

Many of you regular readers of the blog must have read my earlier post on a question asked by Yao Ming, starting center of the Houston Rockets, on whether “participating in sports made an important difference in your professional life“. Yao Ming has been pleasantly surprised by the response from LinkedIn users to his question. In his own words:

“I’d like to thank the LinkedIn users for taking the time to respond to my question. I appreciate your many thoughtful answers and would like to thank you for the kind words and good wishes. I hope you will continue to support the rebuilding efforts in China to help deserving children find schools where they can learn in safety.”

Yao has also picked five respondents to receive 20 raffle tickets each. Here are their five profiles and excerpts from their winning answers:

1. Debbie Elicksen

“There are many similarities between the playing field and the boardroom. Both strategize their next move, both are continually updating the tools of their trade, both use key personnel to inspirit employees to reach success. Regardless of your profession, the following key points can help you reach your potential…” Read more here.

2. Aaron Sault

“The discipline of setting goals and constant evaluation of my performance and associated equipment related perfectly with business. Being pragmatic in meeting business objectives and benchmarking all of the critical factors of success is exactly the same. In my sport a lot of the results were dependant on not just the athlete but the equipment, training programmes, diet etc. Measuring and evaluating what my competition was doing and using in small detail
helped me to understand what factors were making the biggest impacts and also helped me asses my strengths and weaknesses…” Read more here.

3. Merlin Giles

“As someone who has played sport (rugby, cricket) at a high level but never professionally I have taken with me many qualities which you learn on the field. Team work, leadership, competitiveness, resourcefulness, cooperation, dogmatism, quick thinking and drive. These things have helped me in my work life but were obviously noticeable when I did a year of teaching for 7 to 13 year olds…” Read more here.

4. Leslie Dudley

“Yao, Finding my sport was tough as I believed that I had little athletic ability. But when I began learning dressage, I found my passion. I learned… see more that an athlete can be created with hard work and mental toughness. The gift the sport and horses gave to me was self-confidence.  And most of my life lessons I learned by experience riding…” Read more here.

5. Lisa Matthews

“Yao Ming – Yes, playing sports growing up made a significant difference in the way I approach business today. (and still helps today when I get… see more frustrated and need a good outlet!)  Some of the lessons that carryover from sports:

1) You’re only as strong as your weakest link…”

–> And, read 6 other lessons Lisa learned.

As Director of Advertising Sales here at LinkedIn, I spend most of my time talking to companies about their marketing and advertising strategies and how LinkedIn can help them achieve their business objectives.  One topic that comes up often is the idea that the employees of a company are now a very visible part of that company’s overall brand, thanks to the proliferation of profiles on social networks like LinkedIn.

First, it’s important to note that a business’ brand is much more than just a logo and a tag line – it’s a promise of value, a promise made and delivered by the employees of that company. Historically, that promise was communicated to customers through advertising, packaging, PR, promotions, merchandising and in-store experiences, and the only contact with the company’s employees came from salespeople, customer service agents and communications managers.  The rest of the company’s employees where rarely exposed to customers.

That’s pretty crazy when you think about it: people don’t just buy from a company.  They buy from the people at a company. They buy from the people who create the products, the people who design the features, the people who make everything work, and it helps to see the experience levels, expertise, and skills of the people who provide and develop a company’s products and services. Yet it’s been relatively hard for customers to learn about the people who work at a potential supplier.

That’s all changing, and for the better. LinkedIn makes it easy for a potential customer to learn about who works at your company, which will very likely impact their purchase decisions. Let’s say a customer was considering an enterprise software purchase and had narrowed their selection down to two potential vendors. Using LinkedIn’s People Search and Company Profiles, the potential customer could learn a lot about the people who work at each company: What experience do these people have? Who recommends them? Who are they connected to. What insights have they shared in Answers and what kind of expertise have they earned? The answers to those questions – in addition to the strength of the company’s product and its brand reputation – can greatly affect the purchase outcome.

If you’re reading this, chances are you have a LinkedIn profile. If your company needs customers to be successful, then everyone else in your company should have a LinkedIn profile too. Your product people should have profiles, your technicians should have profiles, your CEO should have a profile. You may even want to ask your marketing department for advice on how best to describe your company in your LinkedIn profile, as well as what is that you do to ensure there’s a consistent message about the promise of value that you, your company and your colleagues are making to existing and potential customers.

Is your profile doing all it can to help your company (and you) be more successful?
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Tip #1: Have you checked out LinkedIn’s Advanced People, Name and Reference Search

Here’s Adam Nash’s 5 Tips on how you can search LinkedIn like a Pro

Tip #2: Have you checked out LinkedIn’s Company Profiles?

Here’s a blog post from product manager, Maisy Samuelson, which includes a video demo.

The LinkedIn Intelligent Application Platform is all about surfacing LinkedIn where you need and want it most. Writing or reading an email? LinkedIn should be there, providing context between you and your contacts.

Xobni is an ideal remedy to the pursuit of context — and now with Xobni’s LinkedIn integration, you can find out everything you need to know about a contact before hitting that Send button: The company they work for, their profile picture, and the rich metadata about your history with them.

Leveraging LinkedIn’s Public Profile API, Xobni surfaces the relevant information you need to know, when you need to know it. You can download Xobni’s Outlook plugin here; it makes a great companion to the already indispensable LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar. Make the most of it for you and your contacts: update your public profile and upload a photo today!

While LinkedIn is of use to workers of any profession, some industries are more specialized than others. Are you a lawyer looking to hire on outside counsel? Your LinkedIn network should be easy to tap for recommendations, insights, and inquiries.

LexisNexis‘ legal services directory, martindale.com, is already a premier online destination for lawyers to connect with other lawyers. Now with LinkedIn integration, it helps you find trusted legal professionals by telling you “Who You Know” at a given law firm. Research, evaluate and select legal counsel with confidence— leverage your LinkedIn professional network in your time of need. This is just the beginning of what will be an exceptional integration between LinkedIn and LexisNexis.

The best part of it all is that the more you establish yourself on LinkedIn (by completing your profile, making those meaningful connections, etc…), the more you can benefit from your LinkedIn experience across the web. At your finger tips, no matter where you are, LinkedIn is everywhere these days. Stay tuned to find out where we’ll pop up next!

We live in a global economy and now more than ever, collaborating across borders is a reality for professionals all over the world. Whether we are looking for a trusted partner or understanding how to approach a potential client, we all must reach beyond our national frontiers and seek knowledge through people we know and trust.

So I am happy to announce that starting today, we are extending the benefits of LinkedIn to all the Spanish speakers of the world. Check out a video of me, Patrick and many other colleagues as we welcome you en español!

If I could speak Spanish, here’s what I’d like to say to our Spanish speaking users:

A nuestros usuarios hispanohablantes: ¡Gracias! Gracias por su confianza durante estos años y, ¡bienvenidos a LinkedIn en español! Esperamos que esta transformación les ayude a formar nuevas relaciones profesionales de confianza y fortalecer las existentes.

A nuestros nuevos usuarios: ¡Bienvenidos a LinkedIn! Se han unido a más de 25 millones de profesionales de todo el mundo. Les invitamos a descubrir el potencial de sus redes y a participar y colaborar con sus contactos de confianza. ¿Cómo empezar? Es muy simple: Completen su perfil, amplíen su red y compartan información con sus contactos para generar nuevas oportunidades.

At LinkedIn we are committed to providing professionals with tools to help them be more effective at what they do. Making our site available in Spanish is just another way to address the needs of professionals all over the world. After all, Spanish is spoken by some of the largest and fastest growing group of Internet users. Count this as the beginning of many more languages to come.

–
Editor’s Note: If you’re in a hurry to check out the Spanish version of our site, just log into LinkedIn and access the “Language” drop down menu on the top right hand corner of the homepage header.

We’re glad to announce the launch of our strategic relationship with NYTimes.com that will allow readers to receive targeted news articles based on their unique attributes. In addition, they’ll also be able to share and discuss articles they read on NYTimes.com with other LinkedIn members in their network.

Below is a quick overview of the two features and how you can make use of them, both on LinkedIn and on the NYTimes.com site (NYT):

1. Receive targeted news headlines on NYT

With the LinkedIn-NYTimes.com relationship, members can now receive targeted headlines in every article of the Business & Technology sections (not the homepage) based upon that member’s profession and industry, providing users with the most relevant and valuable content for their profession.

LinkedIn will power a targeted headline feature on NYTimes.com’s Business and Technology pages that will highlight the five latest Times articles relevant to readers based on the non-personally identifiable attributes of their LinkedIn profile (see image below to the right of the article).

For example, LinkedIn members who work in the energy sector will have the option to get relevant, targeted Times stories that cover the energy industry.

2. Share NYT articles on LinkedIn

The second feature we’re announcing today enables you to share any article you read on NYT with your LinkedIn Company Network. This feature is incorporated into the “Share” tool on all article pages in the New York Times site.

Once you click on the Share icon, you’ll have the option to share that article either with your company network or select individuals in your LinkedIn network.

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This is yet another way you can add value to your LinkedIn experience both on and off our site by leveraging the power of your professional network.

For more information on the announcement, please check out the New York Times’ press release as well as our joint announcement on the NYTimes site. Feel free to leave your comments right here on the blog.

I have been working for LinkedIn for the summer. It has been a fantastic experience throughout, but today, it definitely reached a high point when I saw my sports hero and professional passion come together.

I’ve been a Yao Ming fan for the past ten years. One thing I can say is that while most athletes are self-promoting, Yao is all about others in need. Today, he is going high tech on LinkedIn.

Yao Ming, the NBA superstar who plays for the Houston Rockets, is using LinkedIn for a good cause – rebuilding schools for the children devastated in China’s earthquake. He asks a great question to LinkedIn users on the relationship between playing sports and professional success. He is also hoping to bring more awareness to his newly-founded Yao Ming Foundation and his Olympic raffle.

The raffle’s winner and his/her guest will be Yao’s personal guests in the 2008 Olympics. Five answers posted on LinkedIn Answers prior to 11:59pm EDT on 7/19 (Saturday) will be hand-picked by Yao for an award of 20 raffle tickets each.

Yao, a six year veteran in the NBA, became a superstar the moment he entered the league. He started in all six All Star Games and took the Houston Rockets to the NBA playoffs four times. He will also play for the Chinese National Team in the 2008 Olympics next month in Beijing, China.

As accomplished a basketball player as he is, Yao is also well-known for his philanthropic works. Over the years, he worked on important causes such as the rebuilding efforts in the earthquake affected regions in China, raising awareness about AIDS, and wildlife conservation.

So far, the question has gotten great responses. I encourage you to check them out. I wish Yao Ming the best of luck in the upcoming Olympics and with his foundation.

Guest Author – Matt Raible

Last Thursday, Kevin Brown visited LinkedIn’s Mountain View office to do a presentation on Shindig, an OpenSocial Reference Implementation. Below are my notes from his talk.

In September 2007, Google started thinking about Social APIs. Google Gadgets would be better with access to Social Data … but that’s just Google. It was recognized that this is something that many others would like access to. OpenSocial was announced in November 2007. It’s an open standard for developer platforms that has a strong emphasis on “social” data. It’s based on gadgets which is now covered by The Open Social Foundation.

In November, many Googlers started working on a Google Code project based on Java and iGoogle. However, there was too much proprietary code. In December, Brian McCallister of Ning created an ASF Proposal for Shindig. It was a rough port of iGoogle but with Ning’s PHP code. This turned out to be a great starting point. It immediately got interest from Google, Hi5, MySpace and others. While most committers are still from Google, there are 12 developers that work on it full time and they’re adding 2 committers each month. Shindig is a Java/PHP implementation of OpenSocial. Open Campfire is an Apache-licensed .NET implementation that hopes to eventually merge into Shindig.

Shindig has extensive use of existing open source components, including Abdera, Jakarta Commons, Guice, ICU4J, OAuth.net, and JSON.org. It’s largely well tested (developers use TDD), especially for the newer code. There’s a heavy emphasis on DI (Guice helps tremendously) and the builds are done with Maven (Apache recommendation, Kevin hates it).

3 Parts of Shindig:

1. Gadget Rendering: Fetches/parses gadget XML documents. It also provides a robust proxy to implement gadgets.io requirements (including OAuth and Signed Fetch). It acts as a “glue” between JavaScript libraries, remote sites and social data. It’s built for medium to large deployments and has robust HTTP support. Lastly, it’s very flexible so all major components can be replaced.
2. Social API: Handles RESTful API calls and interacts with social data. It provides a backend for opensocial.* JavaScript APIs. It’s mostly a serialization/de-serialization layer that delegates to your social data. Currently evaluation two implementation options (Dave Primer’s AtomPub version or JSON version – lengthy explanation on shindig-dev). Currently, developers are creating an entirely new version because of REST and its JSON support. REST has a lot of issues when it comes to JSON. It works great with AtomPub, but AtomPub has too much verbose XML.
3. Client Code: The first issue that comes up with client code is Security.

For security, iframes cover most of the problems. Cross-domain communication requires special effort – gadgets.rpc has to be implemented using a variety of techniques: window.postMessage in HTML5, document.frameElement in Firefox and window.opener in IE (still in development). Retrieving third-party data is covered by OAuth and Signed Fetch. Getting OAuth / Signed Fetch credentials can be done by passing an encrypted blog of data to the server and treating it as a cookie equivalent. Caja is the future.

Caja (pronounced ka-ha) makes it possible to run third-party JavaScript alongside existing code. It’s not quite ready yet, but significant process has been made. It has limited support in Shindig today, which requires “taming” JavaScript APIs and DOM testing.

Summary

Full support for 0.6-0.8 gadget rendering specification (both versions). Full support for 0.6-0.8 JavaScript APIs. REST mostly done (both versions, PHP is closer). Deployed (or in progress) on many sites: Orkut, hi5, iGoogle sandbox, Hyves, CyWorld, Ning and hundreds of others. It has a very active mailing list and they’re very interested in finding folks with more Maven experience to help out.

The project’s next priority is a stable release. Shindig 1.0 will be OpenSocial 0.8 Compliant. It must have full support for REST. The Java and PHP implementations should be released around the same time. Priority #2 is graduating from Apache Incubator (goals are currently on target). One of the main things they need is more committers, especially those that aren’t from Google. Priority #3 is future enhancements, including:

• 0.9: “proxied” content type
• 0.9: OpenSocial templates
• HTTP Performance Improvements
• “out of the box” shared caching
• More social data implementations (e.g. JDBC)
• Better Documentation

We have many more Tech Talks planned in the future at LinkedIn. Please stay tuned to this blog to learn about new and exciting technologies that we’re learning about.

NOTE: This entry was published with Kevin Brown’s permission.