Blog Link for LinkedIn: Great idea, but suffers from a major problem
If you write a blog and you use LinkedIn, finally there's a way for you to connect these two major components of your professional identity. Sure, you've always been able to put a LinkedIn button on your blog, and you could put a link to your blog on your LinkedIn profile. But the two have never been able to seamlessly come together...until now.
Blog Link, a widget for LinkedIn (one of the new LinkedIn Apps), allows you to display your most recent blog entries on your LinkedIn profile. Additionally, it lets you keep up-to-date on your connections' blogs. From the TypePad website:
BUT...
It doesn't work as well as it should. Now maybe I'm doing something wrong, or I'm overlooking some sort of setting here. I hope that's the case (and if it is, somebody please correct me!). But I watched the explanatory video about the application, and I also checked out their FAQ...and there's no mention of this.
The problem: Blog Link seems to think too many things are blogs. As a result, on my profile it's displaying articles from my company's website that I didn't write, in addition to my blog entries. When I go to view my connections' blogs through Blog Link, it does the same thing -- it shows articles and blogs that my connections didn't write.
What I think is happening is that BlogLink goes into the "Websites" field in your LinkedIn profile, and it looks at those sites for RSS feeds. If it finds an RSS feed, it assumes it's a blog and treats it as a blog. The only problem with that? Lots of sites people put in the "Websites" field aren't their personal blogs. Many people put their company's URL there. So if their company's website has an RSS feed, it shows up as that connection's personal blog within Blog Link.
Here's a screenshot from my LinkedIn profile. The first few it picks up are good, because it's pulling those from the link to my blog. But then it starts picking up my company's site's RSS feed.
I hope this is a problem they're able to iron out, because otherwise BlogLink seems like a pretty nice application.
Blog Link, a widget for LinkedIn (one of the new LinkedIn Apps), allows you to display your most recent blog entries on your LinkedIn profile. Additionally, it lets you keep up-to-date on your connections' blogs. From the TypePad website:
Now you can extend your personal brand even further by sharing the thoughts and insights on your blog with your professional network on LinkedIn.Even though it's built by TypePad, they claim it works with all major blogging platforms. I don't doubt that, because basically all it looks like they're doing is grabbing an RSS feed and displaying it on your LinkedIn page. Nothing horribly complex here -- Facebook has been doing this kind of stuff for years. Don't get me wrong, it's still a great idea. For LinkedIn, which tends to be a pretty locked-down sort of social network, these types of applications are a step in the right direction.
Blog Link automatically pulls in the latest blog posts from around your network so that you can stay up to date on the issues that matter to you from the sources you trust.
BUT...
It doesn't work as well as it should. Now maybe I'm doing something wrong, or I'm overlooking some sort of setting here. I hope that's the case (and if it is, somebody please correct me!). But I watched the explanatory video about the application, and I also checked out their FAQ...and there's no mention of this.
The problem: Blog Link seems to think too many things are blogs. As a result, on my profile it's displaying articles from my company's website that I didn't write, in addition to my blog entries. When I go to view my connections' blogs through Blog Link, it does the same thing -- it shows articles and blogs that my connections didn't write.
What I think is happening is that BlogLink goes into the "Websites" field in your LinkedIn profile, and it looks at those sites for RSS feeds. If it finds an RSS feed, it assumes it's a blog and treats it as a blog. The only problem with that? Lots of sites people put in the "Websites" field aren't their personal blogs. Many people put their company's URL there. So if their company's website has an RSS feed, it shows up as that connection's personal blog within Blog Link.
Here's a screenshot from my LinkedIn profile. The first few it picks up are good, because it's pulling those from the link to my blog. But then it starts picking up my company's site's RSS feed.
I hope this is a problem they're able to iron out, because otherwise BlogLink seems like a pretty nice application.
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