Sharing RSS feeds on LinkedIn Groups
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.
Tags: jengranito, linkedingroups, rssfeedslinkedingroups
trackback
http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/03/20/sharing-rss-feeds-on-linkedin-groups/trackback/
Sean Rehder March 20th, 2009
Quite a few of my rss feeds that I am trying to submit are being rejected by the Linkedin “reader” for my group. What are the restrictions around acceptable rss feeds?
Miguel Reynolds March 20th, 2009
A SUGESTION for groups improvement: why don’t you show a statistic of group members in the group profile section. You have geografic, and profilling information about all that can be usefull to show to identify the profile of the group
LinkedIn Finally Makes Groups More Useful March 20th, 2009
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Scott Lyons March 20th, 2009
I am also trying to add the correct URL for an RSS feed but it it getting rejected.
HELP US.
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Jen Granito March 20th, 2009
@ Sean and Scott – what are the URLs you are trying to add? As long as they are RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or Atom you should be able to add them. You can also try just adding the website that the URLs are from and they might show up in the list of
feed options you can select from.
Please comment back with the URLs that are giving you problems and I will investigate.
LinkedIn Enables RSS Feeds to Enhance Sharing in Groups | Seo Services, LLC - Indiana based search engine optimization consultant March 21st, 2009
[...] is allowing groups on the professional social network to add RSS feeds to aid in news and information sharing. News sharing was first allowed last November and has [...]
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[...] as announced in the e-mail and on the corporate blog, group owners and managers can now create a custom news stream they consider relevant for the group [...]
Daniel Tunkelang March 21st, 2009
Great idea, but the LinkedIn RSS reader seems a bit idiosyncratic. For example, I can’t even get my own blog feed, to appear on my profile page. LinkedIn complains that “The feed URL http://thenoisychannel.com/feed/?feed=rss2 is inaccessible.” Not inaccessible in my browser!
LinkedIn: Bringing RSS to the Masses? March 21st, 2009
[...] offered group owners and managers another way to provide relevant news to their group by way of sharing feeds. Managers can now create customs news feeds by adding an RSS feed, an Atom feed, or just a Web [...]
Darren Sproat March 21st, 2009
This is a good addition to LinkedIn Groups and I am looking forward to using it.
D
LinkedIn: Bringing RSS to the Masses? - Indometric March 21st, 2009
[...] Last November LinkedIn launched a new feature that would allow members of groups to share and discuss news articles. Last week, the professional social network offered group owners and managers another way to provide relevant news to their group by way of sharing feeds. [...]
LinkedIn: Bringing RSS to the Masses? | google android os blog March 22nd, 2009
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Søren Sprogø March 23rd, 2009
Great addition!
But as many others has stated, it very often rejects the feeds.
If you need a test case, try this one from Yahoo Pipes:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=8llM7pvk3RGFfPy4pgt1Yg&_render=rss
FT March 23rd, 2009
Also my feed is not being shown although it is RSS 2.0
How?
Manuel Heredia March 23rd, 2009
Hi!
Is it possible to make an RSS feed out of the activity of group in order to make a widget and promote the group from outside LinkedIn (e.g. in my blog?)
Regards,
M.Heredia
Jen Granito March 23rd, 2009
Hey All,
Thank you for your comments and letting us know there have been some issues with adding feeds.
Our current RSS parser seems to have trouble with certain non-well formed RSS feeds. This seems to affect about 5% of RSS feeds submitted so far according to our logs. We’ll add a more lenient RSS parser which will handle those non-well formed feeds in a future release (hopefully in the next two weeks).
Sean Rehder March 24th, 2009
Please make sure it can accept an RSS feed that comes from Google search. :)
This would allow a moderator to keep the information up-to-date for their group by pulling in an RSS feed based upon “current news” and then pull it when its “not so current.”
Its a different approach to the usual RSS feeds that come from blogs or ongoing publications. Just a thought for you group moderators out there.
~ Sean Rehder
Bruce Carton March 25th, 2009
I would like to take my News tab’s combined output of about 30 RSS feeds I’ve added, and turn it into one Group RSS feed. Can you enable that?
LinkedIn: Bringing RSS to the Masses? « ChristineGroganTaylor’s Blog March 25th, 2009
[...] Last November LinkedIn launched a new feature that would allow members of groups to share and discuss news articles. Last week, the professional social network offered group owners and managers another way to provide relevant news to their group by way of sharing feeds. [...]
Tristina March 26th, 2009
I added an RSS feed to a group, but I now want to remove it. I see how I can delete an individual item, but how can I remove an entire feed?
csrollyson March 30th, 2009
Jen, I have a question as an owner/manager of several groups. This question came from a client who also manages a group, and I can’t find information in help or anywhere.
Group owners used to be able to export group member information (firstname, lastname, email), but sometime that functionality went away. Is there a new way to do this, or has it gone away due to capturing/spamming. Of course, I see that you have introduced the new ability to send a max of one group communication per week. Can you verify that it’s no longer possible to export and how group owners could do it now?
Thanks- Chris
Tim Long March 30th, 2009
In addition to LinkedIn rejecting some valid feed URLs, there is also a weird caching problem. This happens with feed URLs that use query parameters to filter the feed based on tags, etc. For example, if I add the following feed to one of my groups:
http://community.tigranetworks.co.uk/blogs/tim_long/rss.aspx?Tags=ASCOM&AndTags=1
This works, but then when I try to add a similar URL to a different group:
http://community.tigranetworks.co.uk/blogs/tim_long/rss.aspx?Tags=Astronomy&AndTags=1
This second URL is ignored and the first URL is used instead. Clearly, that results in the wrong content being syndicated, so this is a serious usability problem.
–Tim Long
The LinkedIn Blog » Blog Archive 5 ways to get more from your LinkedIn Groups « March 31st, 2009
[...] 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 [...]
Darren Scott April 1st, 2009
Doesn’t work!!!
Just rejects every RSS I have tried to add!
D
dirkfrey April 2nd, 2009
This functionality doesn’t exist today but I’m forwarding it on to the product owner for consideration in future releases. Thanks for your feedback!
Sean Rehder April 2nd, 2009
Is there a maximum number of RSS feeds that can go into one group?
~ Sean Rehder
dirkfrey April 2nd, 2009
@ Trista -A group owner/manager can delete any RSS feed that has been added by clicking on the ‘Manage News Feeds’ link found on the right navigational area of your group’s ‘News’ tab. This should provide you with a listing of all of your news feeds. Clicking on the gray “X” on the particular news feed will remove it. Good luck with your group!
Dirk Frey April 2nd, 2009
@Tim- I’ve passed on your request to the appropriate team and they are working to identify the issue right now. I’ll make sure we provide an update once it’s resolved. Thanks for the heads up!
Dirk Frey April 3rd, 2009
@Sean – You can post a maximum of 30 RSS feeds to your group’s news section. That should give the plenty of reading material.
Glen Justice April 3rd, 2009
@Jen You guys on track for the new parser? Having trouble adding: http://madmariner.com/news/rss/feed. Thanks.
mark April 4th, 2009
RSS Reader is rejecting the below feeds. Why?
http://rss.jobsearch.monster.com/rssquery.ashx?q=Vice President&where=Denver2c+CO&lid=363&rad=20&rad_units=miles&qlt=1297391&qln=750153&cy=us&brd=1&baseurl=jobview.monster.com
http://rss.indeed.com/rss?q=Vice+President&l=Denver%2C+Colorado
Tom Russell April 5th, 2009
Cannot add the URL below or many others.
Group members don’t care why there are no interesting news feeds in a group … they will simply visit other sites.
feed://search.issuu.com/used_boat_watch_feb_2009/docs/recent.rss
Michael April 7th, 2009
we are trying to put a valid feed (http://www.sgia.org/rss/executive_update.xml), that passes W3 validator with flying colors ( http://validator.w3.org/feed ) – but it just does not show up on linked in. If its a matter of strictness – one would think that regardless of how strict LinkedIn parser is, it should accept feeds considered to be valid by W3.org. We are excited by this new feature and are looking forward to its more lenient implementation.
Thank you, guys!
Andy Bryant April 8th, 2009
I also had problems submitting a feed from yahoo pipes
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=2CuqVJAF3hGn6CPq_g6H4A&_render=rss
Nick Davis April 13th, 2009
Feed now added but won’t post news
I have added the following RSS feed to my group, it wasn’t accepting the feed at first (I have now got round this problem) but unfortunately it isn’t posting any news stories to the news feed of the group, why is this please?
http://constructionweekonline.com/index.php/rssFeed/WebRssFeeds/NEWS
Dirk Frey April 14th, 2009
@Michael – Changes made last Thursday should have resolved your issue. Please contact Customer Service if you continue to have RSS issues as it becomes hard to troubleshoot through a forum like this.
Dirk Frey April 14th, 2009
@Nick – Yes we were very happy to get the RSS feed requirements tweaked last Thursday to allow more group users to add their feed without errors. Please contact Customer Service with their link posted at the bottom of most LinkedIn pages. We will be glad to help you trouble shoot why new still isn’t posting.
JB April 14th, 2009
I just wanted to share my experience trying to add a WordPress blog to my LinkedIn profile. If you are having issues – e.g. getting a “….feed=rss2 is inaccessible.” error message when saving the link to your blog, the problem may be the blog itself. In my case, I am hosting my own blog using a dynamic DNS service to route requests to my home server.
Simple flow diagram of how requests to my blog site get handled:
User(s) go to –> –> –>
If I put in the WordPress LinkedIn app URL for , I was getting the error above “…feed=rss2 is inaccessible.” If I put in the Dynamic DNS hostname, everything is gravy. The LinkedIn WordPress app was seeing an HTML frame when trying to parse URL and would error out.
Try this workaround if it applies to you and a handful of the other 5% crowd who can’t add their blog website to their LinkedIn profile. BTW, using the W3C validator tool was invaluable to determine if my site was a valid RSS feed so use it first:
http://validator.w3.org/feed/
JB
John Petersen April 19th, 2009
What a great pity rss-feeds dont work. Would have been a great feature.
Dirk Frey April 21st, 2009
@ John – RSS has been a great hit with groups so it sounds like there may be some isolated events. Its hard to know what the issue is with the detail you have provided but please contact Customer Support so the team can trouble shoot your specific issue. Click on Customer Service at the bottom of your home page and search for RSS. If you don’t find your answer click on the Ask Customer Service tab that will appear after searching. This will allow you to submit a ticket with the specific issue you are experiencing and a screen shot if you have one.
Irene Aldridge April 21st, 2009
Hi, I still have a problem with my RSS feed on linked in:
The feed URL http://www.ablemarkets.com/?feed=rss2 is inaccessible.
You keep referring to “well-formatted” feeds; do you have guidelines on what feeds are well-formatted?
Thanks!
John April 28th, 2009
Will you be adding RSS feeds for discussions, jobs etc? It is too time consuming to go into each group and navigate through all of the tabs.
Heatherdawn Wadleigh May 1st, 2009
I added my feed (below) 3 days ago, the feed was read, and news stories were posted to the group. Unfortunately, there have been no new news stories posted to the group since I originally added the feed on Tuesday. What gives?
http://www.buildingonline.com/news/rss09.xml
Dirk Frey May 8th, 2009
@John I can’t say whether this is a feature yet to be released but I have forwarded your comment on to the product owners for future consideration in the development of Groups.
Thanks!
Dirk
Dirk Frey May 8th, 2009
@Irene – The link you provided is a web page with an rss feed embedded. Unfortunately, most feed parsers will not be smart enough to figure this out.
Feeds can be validated via: http://validator.w3.org/feed/
At the minimum, if you ‘View Source’ on the page, it MUST begin with “<?xml” tag before anything else according to the RSS or Atom feed specs.
I hope this helps!
Dirk
Matt May 13th, 2009
Trying to get the WP app going (looks cool) but I am getting the same error message.
“The feed URL http://www.supercloud.com/blog?feed=rss2 is inaccessible.”
The validation thing says “XML parsing error: :70:0: unclosed CDATA section”
Brand new version of WordPress 2.7.1
Have not touched the code. When I look at the feed it looks fine to me. Starts with “<?xml” rss version 2.0. yadda
Any ideas?
Matt
Dirk Frey May 19th, 2009
@Matt – Please contact our Customer Service Group and they can help trouble shoot your issue.
Dirk
Abe June 10th, 2009
I’m trying to add my blog at npfunds.com/blog but am also getting the error The feed is inaccessible. My feed has been approved by the w3c validation.
Adi July 10th, 2009
Is there any way of exporting content out of the groups via rss? So people can subscribe to a groups discussions or jobs via rss?
Dirk Frey July 10th, 2009
@Adi- That functionality doesn’t exist at this time. I know the Product developers have this on their list to consider in future enhancements.
Tom Connelly July 16th, 2009
Linked in may also want to consider that many WordPress webmasters change their permalinks structure to be more SEO friendly, to the /%category%/%postname%/ setting, which changes the way the blog displays it’s links from the ones with the ?=blahblah to /nice/directory/structures ….
Also, Google Chrome web browser seems to be unsupported for displaying the feeds within linkedin.
I was able to add a linkedin tagged entry, but it took only one and does not display the others, and randomly displays the error that everyone here is complaining about. This is a LinkedIn issue, NOT a WordPress or other issue.
Carolyn Goodwin July 27th, 2009
I can’t seem to get my blog feed working either. Here is the RSS feed:
http://brandsthatthink.com/?feed=rss2
Any assistance would be much appreciated!
Dirk Frey July 29th, 2009
@Carolyn – Have you contacted customer service about this issue? They can assist you in trouble shooting the issue.
Edo Amin August 9th, 2009
I was pretty happy about this feature and added my Facebook feed. The feed appears in my group (yay!) but with an arbitrarily attached signature (boo!) that is not found anywhere in the original feed (huh?). It follows that it was added by LinkedIn’s mechanism. This may have far-reaching significance both technically and legally. Am I the only LinkedIn user using Facebook feeds?
SEO August 11th, 2009
That’s great, I never thought about Sharing RSS feeds on LinkedIn Groups like that before.
John D August 13th, 2009
I have had the same problem of rss=2 is inaccessible but I seem to have fixed it. This is how I did it. I needed to download the 2.8.4 update and since my blog is hosted on a separate service that includes wordpress as a service I had to upload the new upgrade using an FTP client software. I use Fetch since I am using a Mac. So I downloaded the upgrade, unzipped it into a separate file. Opened the new unzipped file, Opened Fetch and connected to my blog site. Then grabbed all the files in the new unzipped folder and simply dragged them to the fetch window and the upload began. Took awhile since there are a number of files.
Once finished I went to my linkedin profile had to submit the blog address again and Presto it showed up and so far seems to be working steadily. I have had this happen before but then it dropped out so I am watching it closely, but so far so good. This is what I think happened. I think one of the files, and God only knows which one became corrupted in some way. I am using Artisteer to generate custom themes. In any case once I uploaded all the files from the upgrade it seems that it reset itself and the blog is now coming in loud and clear on the linkedin site. But maybe, just maybe it is pure magic. hmmmm, i will think on that one. Good Luck.
Scott H September 22nd, 2009
I am trying to create an RSS feed of group activity in order to promote it outside of LinkedIn. Is this possible?
Dirk Frey September 29th, 2009
@ Scott- Unfortunately that is not a functionality we currently support. I have forwarded on your comment to the Product Manager for future consideration.
Paul October 2nd, 2009
What data is used to populate the From: field displayed on the RSS content in the Latest News area?
Dirk Frey October 8th, 2009
@Paul – I’m told that we get the source names from the RSS feeds themselves and that we map URL domains to source names. Thanks for your interest! -Dirk
Paul October 8th, 2009
@Dirk – Thank you Dirk, I realize that you get the source names from the feed but I would like to find out which RSS element specifically e.g. title.
The reason that I ask is because the RSS updates in my group news area are displaying a source name that is incorrect and is not in my RSS feed.
Becky Smith October 18th, 2009
Can you publish the correct syntax for a google news feed w/search term OSHA VPP?
I grow tired of trying to find any useable help here.
Dominic Bignall October 19th, 2009
Hi there,
I was wondering if anyone knew how often the Rss feeds in groups are being pulled on – the site mentioned every 6 hours I think – but I am noticing days -3
any guidance would be great thanks
Dirk Frey November 2nd, 2009
@Becky- Sorry for the delay in this response. Try http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=OSHA+VPP&cf=all&output=rss. The RSS link is at the bottom of the google news search results page.
Dirk Frey November 2nd, 2009
@Dominic – I’ve been told that this should be resolved and that feeds which are subscribed to should be pulled every 6 hours or faster. If you see a greater delay than that, please contact Customer Service with your group name and your feed URL. They can then file a bug to the product engineers to investigate further. Thanks!
Michael Kesterton November 17th, 2009
It accepts the feed and then never picks them up. Nice idea but doesn’t appear to work at all. I even attempted routing my feeds through feed burner and it still doesn’t work
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Hey there, great to see a fellow biker post their experiences. I’m really impressed by your blog, I
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Charles King February 5th, 2010
How can I get information that will help me with starting my new group, Trade show traffic building? I set it up, but can not figure out how to put a link to it on my home page. I sent a friend an invitation to join, but he had trouble finding it, then I saw his request to join. I tried to accept, but his request disappeared. Is there a tutorial somewhere that would help a novice like me? Thanks, Charles King