LinkedIn is courting influential bloggers

It's been a little over three months since Twitter decided that it has outgrown LinkedIn as a federated network partner.  If you recall, Twitter used to not only allow LinkedIn to post its status update to Twitter, but also tweets to appear as network update on LinkedIn.  But on June 29th Twitter stopped its tweets showing up on LinkedIn.

Since then LinkedIn has been working on its counterstrike.  Starting last week we are beginning to see how LinkedIn wants to fill the gap left by Twitter.

LinkedIn wants to be the network of business content and the means to promote the content.  Last week LinkedIn launched its blogging service.  It's available to famous influencers on each subject area, and not to everyone.  The idea is to get these influential members to create original content within LinkedIn platform and allow them to promote them right on LinkedIn.

I wouldn't be surprise if these people were getting paid
to produce original content.
Source: www.linkedin.com

Blogs and social network

As a blogger, I have been writing on and off for little over a year.  When starting, I had committed myself to write once a day, but with my workload it proved to be a difficult commitment to keep.  These days perhaps I've slacked off too much, not even posting a blog per week.

When I first started writing, the most difficult thing was finding readers.  How do you know whether anyone is reading your blog?  If you wrote something that no one cared to read, is it not a complete waste of time?  Well, I believe it is not a waste of time.  It's because when you write something it helps you think logically and organize your thoughts into black and white.  It's amazing how often I found myself changing my opinion once I started writing a blog entry.  When you are thinking about things in your head without sequencing them as one logical argument, it is hard to make your argument clear even for yourself.