The Top 5 Stories You Shared on LinkedIn This Week

Starting today, Daniel Roth (Executive Editor, LinkedIn) will be covering the top 5 stories that our members are sharing on LinkedIn Today. You can check out his column here. - Ed

One billionaire demands more taxes, another demands handsets, and a British newspaper demands changes -- it's the LinkedIn Today Top 5 -- our new weekly feature looking at the most publicly shared articles by LinkedIn members. Here are this week's top 5:

Top 5 most shared articles on LinkedIn for the week of Aug. 14

1. "Stop Coddling the Super Rich," New York Times
2. "Google Buys Motorola Mobility For $12.5B, Says 'Android Will Stay Open'," TechCrunch
3. "Google Buys Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion," Mashable
4. "Supercharging Android: Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility," Official Google blog
5. "The Moral Decay of Our Society is as Bad at the Top as the Bottom," The Telegraph

The top spot this week goes to Warren Buffett who penned an op-ed on Sunday called "Stop Coddling the Super Rich." He pegs his piece to the formation of the "super committee:" the 12 U.S. Congress members charged with finding at least $1.5 trillion in federal savings over the next decade. Buffett calls on Washington to quit treating his high-net-worth friends like "spotted owls," who need the tenderest of protection.

"I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people," he writes. "Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering."

On Monday, the conversation quickly shifted from Omaha to Mountain View, Calif., when Google declared its intention to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

LinkedIn members gravitated to three stories about the deal: news write-ups from TechCrunch and Mashable, along with Google CEO Larry Page's own post on the deal. " I have loved my Motorola phones from the StarTAC era up to the current DROIDs," Page writes (doing his best Victor Kiam). He goes on to explain that he also loves other holdings of the firm:

Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.

Rounding out the most-shared list this week is a pull-no-punches piece from The Telegraph's chief political commentator, Peter Oborne. Called "The Moral Decay of Our Society is as Bad at the Top as the Bottom," the article blames the looting and rioting in London on "moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society." No one is spared, from Virgin's Richard Branson to Downing Street.

Elsewhere on LinkedIn Today, a few news items managed to catch fire in multiple industries. Bloomberg's article on U.S. mortgage rates hitting 50 year lows became a must read among banking, real estate and financial services professionals (with "buy now?" rivaling "buy now!" for the most common comment.)

Harvard Business Review's "Are You a Role Model?," quickly trended in education management, management consulting, and IT. In that essay, the Energy Project's Tony Schwartz returns to Warren Buffett's call for higher taxes. It's OK to applaud Buffett, he says, but the real focus must be on nurses, teachers and others who are giving up something to make a difference:

Let's save our admiration for people whose lives are about serving a greater good, and our greatest admiration for those who are willing to make sacrifices to do so.