[Editors Note: This is the start of a biweekly series of tips & tricks for collaborating more effectively with other professionals through LinkedIn groups.]

Millions of our members join their first groups to associate themselves with a university, company alumni group, trade organization, or professional interest. (Or Red Sox Nation.) Having the logos of these groups on your profile adds depth and color to your professional identity on the Web. But the logo is only the start of the story.

Here are 5 ways to get the most out of your groups memberships:

1. Commit to a couple of groups focused on your key professional interests. LinkedIn groups provide the opportunity to collaborate with professionals you would otherwise never meet – and with current and former coworkers, all in the same professional environment. Pick a couple of interests about which you’re most passionate and jump into the action of groups focused on those interests. Many of our most active members find their participation in the right groups directly enriches what they do at work.

2. Follow other groups. Groups provide a great way to keep track of what your fellow professionals have on their mind and what news they think is notable. Subscribe to the digest emails summarizing the activity of the group. Use our new tools for “Following” to keep an eye on the specific discussions you care about most. I use this a lot myself to monitor the flow of key discussions from my work email so I can jump in quickly at the right moment.

3. Use the news. Posting news is one of the best ways to participate in groups – it takes less thought and work up front than starting a discussion, and groups provide an easy way to get your fellow professionals’ take on an article or blog post… or to gain additional reputation for your take. Post a couple of articles a week that catches your interest while browsing the Web, the newsletters you get, your RSS reader, your Facebook feed, or Twitter. Now that managers can add RSS feeds to their groups, suggest they include your favorite news source or your own brilliant blog.

4. Involve your coworkers. You’ve invested a lot of time building up professional trust with your coworkers, both past and present. Invite four (or more) coworkers with whom you usually discuss your favorite professional interests to join you in the broader collaboration in your LinkedIn group.

5. Learn about your fellow LinkedIn members. LinkedIn groups are unique because they’re special contexts within the world’s largest professional network. Take full advantage of that by clicking through to the profiles of fellow members, sparking conversations about what they’re working on, and as relationships develop – inviting them to become connections.

LinkedIn groups are powerful ways to get noticed and enrich your professional network in these difficult economic times. One of our favorite success stories is this one from the Wall Street Journal blog we mentioned before.

Got a LinkedIn Groups success story? Please share it in the comments.

From the day we launched, LinkedIn has been about helping professionals build and maintain trusted relationships online. Over the past six years, we’ve seen millions of professionals gravitate towards this concept and members are signing up for LinkedIn in unprecedented numbers.

Today over 37 million professionals on LinkedIn believe that bringing our real-world professional relationships online will help all of us work smarter. While the network grows rapidly, we want to make sure that we preserve the user experience – for every user – by maintaining the integrity of the site. Unfortunately, it has come to our attention that a very small number of users tarnish the experience for some members of our community.

This extremely limited but abusive behavior violates our Terms of Service.  This includes examples such as not using a real name/person as the profile owner, falsifying info, creating fake profiles, trying to use someone else’s account, massively inviting people they don’t know, and using the data in a way not authorized or intended by LinkedIn’s Terms of Service.  This behavior, though infrequent, strikes at the very root of a trusted professional network.

We take these violations very seriously and will not tolerate this behavior. We’ll be contacting these users with a warning and any subsequent violation will result in the restriction or the termination of their account.

Moving forward, we’ll continue responding to complaints of abuses. We’ve also created an email address for you to report inappropriate behavior. Please email us, should you notice abusive behavior on LinkedIn.

And thanks for making LinkedIn a great network of professionals.  We really appreciate it.

Some of you may have noticed the change to how and when your inbox shows up on your homepage: it will only appear when you have unread messages – but your inbox and your read messages are always available from the left navigation bar on the homepage. So, when your Inbox is empty and doesn’t display on your LinkedIn homepage, click through to your Inbox to check out your read messages.

Clicking through to the main page of your Inbox also reveals a new tabbed structure: all messages are easily accessible from the Received, Sent and Archived tabs. At a glance you can now see all your messages and easily drill down by applying a filter, for example invitations.

Check out the new look of your Inbox and leave us your feedback at the bottom of the post.

[Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of contributing guest author posts from LinkedIn users. Today you hear from CEO of Moo.com, Richard Moross, who outlines ways for professionals to stand out from the crowd with your business cards. Did you know: you could create a set of Moo business cards by pulling in information from your LinkedIn profile?]

I started moo.com because of an obsession with great design, a love of the web and a desire to combine both in a business which would help people unleash their creativity, stand-out, connect and prosper.

You only get one chance to make a first impression and for nearly 300 years the humble business card has been the primary tool for transferring business information to new contacts in a universal and memorable format. Even today, in the exciting, digital world of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, this simple, tactile product goes from strength to strength. Indeed, the more digital the world becomes, the more powerful useful offline tools like business cards become.

They may only be little but it’s what you do with them that counts. As a serious platform for promoting your business, I’m often surprised by how unremarkable people choose to make their business cards. They are, after all, the ultimate direct marketing tool – something that your potential customer or client is given in person, takes away, and hopefully keeps forever.

Here are my top 10 tips for creating remarkable and memorable business cards; cards that will help you and your business stand out in these difficult economic times.

1. Thought: Whether you are having your cards designed by a graphic designer, or creating the look yourself, take some time to plan your cards.  Look at the cards you’ve collected over the years to see what elements you like, and incorporate them into your design. Your business card may be the first and last thing a contact remembers you by, so make sure you are really happy with them. (Browse our ideas pages and flickr pool for some great ideas and design tips)

2. Individuality: Your card should say something about who you are/what you do.  It should be personal and show off the scope of what you do, and be easily recognisable as YOUR card.  When the recipient is flicking through their Rolodex, your card should jump out and remind them of you.

3. Impact: Your cards should be remarkable.  They should spark interest and should prompt further questions about your cards, your business, yourself.  Use a bold image, statement or novel shape to grab attention – don’t be shy, this is all about attention.  Don’t let the exchange of your business card be the end of a conversation, but rather the beginning of one. It should stand out from the crowd and make an impact.

4. Relevance to recipient: Are you handing your card to an existing client, a headhunter, a stranger? Tailor your card to the recipients to maximise the effect.  Hand over a card that demonstrates your awareness of who THEY are, and what they might find interesting about you and your business.  Take an interest in who they are and they’ll take more notice of who you are.

5. Context: Are these cards for you to take to meetings, leave on tables or pass out at events or trade shows.  The different environments that you might want to use business cards should affect the look and purpose.  If you are handing them over you can use your charm (!) to complete the story that your cards start to tell.  If you are leaving them to be found, you’ll need to tell the whole story in the card.  And if you are at a trade event, use them as promotional tools to give discounts, send people to your website and grab attention.

6. Quality: Your card should make an impression both to the eye and in the hand.  Impress your contacts by handing over a card that feels great as well as looks great. A thick, smooth stock or using a recycled, pure stock, with highest quality printing can make a long-lasting impression.

7. Get the details right: Your card should make it easy for someone to follow up and contact you.  Provide correct contact details in a clear, legible way.  Don’t over-clutter with unnecessary information (e.g every social network you have ever joined up to), but make sure that a potential client knows how to find you.

8. Up to date: There’s no point in handing out cards with old information, images or product news.  Use your cards as an indication of what you are up to at the moment.  If you have a new product or service, showcase it on your cards.  If you use them as sales tools, but no longer stock the product or offer the service, make new cards. Order your cards in short, inexpensive runs to make sure you don’t lose money by having piles of out of date cards. Don’t forget to recycle the old ones though!

9. Presenting the card: The Japanese have an established, formal etiquette for handing over cards in order to set the right tone.  You don’t need to go that far, but do think about how YOU come across when handing out your card. Make sure you look presentable and smile and make eye contact.  Though it sounds silly, it can make a big different to being remembered.  Also think about how you take out your card.  Rather than dragging them out of a suit pocket or the bottom of your bag, why not carry a smart card holder to keep your cards neat and clean and make a good impression when handing them over.

10. Use them!: There’s no point in making the most beautiful cards to then keep them in a desk drawer – get them out there.  Keep a stock of cards in your briefcase or bag at all times.  When you go to a meeting or event, hand the cards out to anyone and everyone.  You never know who will be the person to follow up, so give yourself the best chance possible.

This post belongs to a continuing LinkedIn Blog series on users who beat the odds in today’s economy, by winning jobs or closing business deals through relationships built on LinkedIn. Today’s story is from the New York Times, where one of our users Amy Baker describes 10 ways to help recently laid off friends, find a job:

1. I invite them to lunch.

2. I present them with a “job search survival kit.” This includes a notebook for writing their ideas/interview notes in and a Starbucks card for the networking they will do or simply for a treat.

3. The first piece of advice in the notebook is “Always accept a free lunch. You will do the same when you are in their shoes.” Most people don’t know how to be on the receiving end of generosity and forget it makes both sides feel good.

4. I tell them the first thing they should do is sign up for unemployment, and I explain how it works and what to do (many are not familiar with the system, but it was a godsend during my search) .

5. I make sure they are on LinkedIn, offer help with their résumé and offer to be a recommendation.

I would add a quick and easy tip -  use your LinkedIn Status update to broadcast to your network that your friend is looking for a job. Don’t forget to add your friend’s public profile URL in the update as well. Think of it as using your professional network to do good. Also, feel free to leverage the power of other social networks like Twitter to amplify the message at the same time.

The second, more obvious suggestion is to help your friend by volunteering a recommendation on LinkedIn. I’m seeing way more recommendations pop up on my network updates these days and it really surfaces some great candidates for job openings, particularly since it comes from my trusted network.

Read the remaining 5 tips from Amy Baker, in the New York Times, here. Have you helped a friend find a job? Leave a comment.

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 recent announcements, tips and tricks, or success stories.

About a month ago LinkedIn released the code for an open source distributed storage system called Project Voldemort. I wanted to give a little more information about what it is good for, how it came to be, and what our plans are for the future.

Some Background

Like a lot of websites, LinkedIn started with a single big database and a cluster of front-end servers (unlike a lot of websites it also started out with a big social graph in memory on remote machines, but that is a different story). As we grew, this database got split into a variety of remote services for serving up profiles, performing searches, interacting with groups, maintaining network updates, fetching companies, etc. These databases may have read-only replicas, but we didn’t have a system for scaling writes.

Unfortunately for engineers and DBAs, many of the rich features that people expect from a modern internet site either require massive data sets or high write loads, or both. This became a problem as we looked at how to scale some write-intensive features like Who’s Viewed My Profile that require as many updates as reads. We faced a similar scale problem for offline computed data, such as finding similar profiles—the set of all user profiles is very large, but even a modest subset of the set of all user profile pairs is quite huge.

To handle this problem we looked at the systems other internet companies had built. We really like Google’s Bigtable, but we didn’t think it made sense to try to build it if you didn’t have access to a low-latency GFS implementation. Our primary goal was to get low-latency, high-availability access to our data. For complex analysis we had Hadoop and databases, for complex queries we had a distributed search system, and the goal wasn’t to try to duplicate any of these. We were inspired by Amazon’s Dynamo paper, which seemed to meet the needs we have as well as being feasible to implement with low-latency queries–much of our design for Project Voldemort comes from that.

Our experience with the system so far has been quite good. We were able to move applications that needed to handle hundreds of millions of reads and writes per day from over 400ms to under 10ms while simultaneously increasing the amount of data we store.

Open Source

LinkedIn is a big open source user, and we have contributed back a number of the improvements to Lucene we have made such as Zoie, Kamikaze, and Bobo. Most of the things we build are pretty LinkedIn-specific, but things like search and storage are pretty much stand-alone and we are happy to get other users (and contributors!). I myself have been a long-time open source lurker—I am the first to check out the source, but rarely have the time to make any improvements. Fortunately, even if most people are as lazy as me, not all are. In the last few months we have got close to 50 contributions from people around the world. Some are small, just doing a little cleanup, and others have been quite substantial introducing new features or major code improvements.

The long-term success of an open source project depends on its not being controlled by a single company, person, group, but forming a real self-sustaining group of interested developers. This is our goal in working on the open source project. LinkedIn is not a storage systems company, and neither are the other web companies facing some of the same problems, so we think we think we can all benefit by sharing our work in this area.

The Future

So what is next for the project? The most important feature for a storage system is always improving performance and reliability. But there are a couple of other things in the works. We are working on making it easier to incrementally add to clusters of servers, improving our support for batch computed data from Hadoop, and implementing some clients in other programming languages.

For more information on the project, check out the main site. We are always looking for contributors to the project, so if you are interested check out the projects page and mailing list. Ideas, bug reports, patches, etc. are all gladly accepted.

Interested in similar projects, check out the job openings at LinkedIn to work on it full time.

Stay tuned for upcoming blog posts that will reveal more details of the system internals and some of the lessons learned

Since we launched news sharing in groups, users have shared nearly a million articles with professional colleagues.

The obvious desire for people to share and discuss news with their peers begged for us to develop more ways for people to collaborate on the numerous streams of news intelligence coming from publishers and bloggers.

This week we are launching a feature that will allow group owners and managers to create a custom news stream composed of RSS or Atom feeds that will be relevant for the group.  By adding an RSS feed, Atom feed, or just web site URL, managers will be able to create a feed tailored specifically for their group.

Group members will benefit by having a comprehensive news digest readily available to them on LinkedIn.  It can be a great way to discover new blogs and sources because they were shared in to the group and last, but not least, group members can discuss hot topics that are a result of this stream.

If your group manager has enabled news and discussions, you can find this feature under news tab in  “Latest News”.  If your group manager has not added a feed that you think would be a valuable inclusion for the group, send them a message with your suggestion.

We hope you enjoy the latest news feature that will allow you to consume, discuss, and collaborate on news within your groups.  As always, we are looking forward to your feedback and comments on this blog post as you consume news in a whole new way on the web.

Do your groups have this functionality turned on?

Many companies in the Bay Area have holiday parties at the end of the year, but we decided to wait and celebrate with a donation at a most unusual time of year – St. Patrick’s Day. Re-sale shops and donations in general have been at an all time low this year, and we decided to give to The Shop in Menlo Park, Ecumenical Hunger Program, and Second Harvest.

Party organizers, Brooke and Florina, with the donations mountain

The setup was quite unique – casino day mixed with green beer and lots of corned beef. The donations came in massive waves as everyone at LinkedIn opened their hearts and their wallets. Each donated item was given a raffle ticket in exchange, and there was over 20 prizes to be won. In the end, more than 3000 (!) raffle tickets were distributed with donations from over 120 of our colleagues at LinkedIn.

Now let’s get to the party details. The wonderful people at Class Casino set up Blackjack, Roulette, Craps, and Pai Gow poker tables. The talented chef at Mountain Terrace and Alice’s Restaurant prepared a bevvy of traditional Irish food, as well as wonderful fruit and cheese platters. The green beer was flowing, the music was blasting, and let’s not forget all those people who took advantage of the audience to improve their Rock Band skills.

LinkedIn celebrates St.Patrick's Day

Check out the rest of the pictures!

This post belongs to a continuing LinkedIn Blog series on users who beat the odds in today’s economy, by winning jobs or closing business deals through relationships built on LinkedIn. Today’s story is syndicated from the Wall Street Journal’s Laid off and Looking blog, which chronicles the experience of eight job seekers who’ve been recently laid off.

Amanda Sundt replaced Brian Murphy, as one of eight out-of-work professionals who blogged their job hunt experience in the Wall Street Journal. Little did she know that soon she’d be making her last blog post contribution, thanks to a job she found on LinkedIn Groups.

I found my new job through participating in an industry group on the professional networking site LinkedIn. The CEO saw my resume and sent me a note as I mentioned before saying he had heads up about the layoffs at my former employer and wondered if I was interested in the open position at his firm.

Once Amanda found her new job she recounts her aha moment, how it made her a believer in professional networking and the importance of building your network before you need it.

I will continue to be active on LinkedIn, and will accept and extend invitations to networking lunches and other events because I have realized that you cannot turn your network on and off depending on your job status. At the end of day, we all really work for one employer—ourselves. So it is essential to make time to maintain and grow your network to prepare for whatever may lie ahead.

At the end of the day, I realize that I had to pursue all channels available to me to find my next opportunity. And after this experience, I am determined that I will continue to invest time and effort in growing my network and assisting those who need help finding their next opportunity.

Read the rest of Amanda’s job hunt lessons here.

Since the start of the recession in December 2007, millions of jobs have been lost both in the US as well as globally, easily exceeding any previous downturn in the last half a century. While finding jobs is one piece of the equation, getting a job is most closely related to successful professional networking and that’s where LinkedIn can help.

We are focused on helping our members leverage their LinkedIn profile and business relationships to uncover these new opportunities whenever, wherever. A case in point is the partnership we announced with Right Management, the largest global provider of outplacement solutions. Integrating LinkedIn’s functionality and networking capabilities with Right Management services allows job seekers the ability to maintain a competitive edge in this challenging economic environment by leveraging their LinkedIn network while they look for a job.

If you’re using Right Management’s outplacement services, in this challenging job market, their career consultants will work with you to develop your LinkedIn profile to showcase your expertise and provide you with specialized training to ensure the benefits of LinkedIn are fully maximized in your job hunt.

Update your LinkedIn profile and enhance the number of your connections on LinkedIn to build your professional brand before you need it.