News Recommendation and Discovery Improvements

Following the announcement of LinkedIn News we regularly been shipping improvements and built on top of the existing functionality.  We are continuously adding companies that are able to see news as well as news queries that should be relevant for those companies. Additionally we are constantly adding new sources for which we pull, we have added news sharing, company discussions around news articles, and last week Armin Ahumada improved how you can recommend an article and Eishay Smith improved how we add syndicated feeds (such as RSS and ATOM) to our fetcher.

1. Recommendation Improvements

Almost everywhere that you see new, you will see a thumb’s-up.  There are three different states:

Grey = no one has recommended or commented on the article
Blue = someone within your company has recommended or commented on the article
Blue with orange rays = you have recommended or commented on the article.

The benefit to having these states is that it allows you to look at all of the news that is provided to you and scan for articles that your co-workers have engaged with and it helps you decide which articles you would like to take the time to read.

2. News Discovery

When users submit a new article to the site, we are paying attention to the source the article is from.  If we are not getting articles from that source already, we will check to see if the publisher has any syndication feeds that we can fetch news from.  If you are a blogger or a professional online journal in a niche category, it can be hard for us to find you. To start seeing your own content on LinkedIn organically, promote your blog or publication on LinkedIn by listing it as a website on your profile or share your blog posts with your company and connections by “Submitting a new article”.  On that note, we are doing our best to provide our members news of high quality so this does not guarantee news distribution on the LinkedIn, but it definitely won’t hurt :)