Linkedin starts a corporate Blog

Vincent Wright wrote on a yahoo group that Linkedin has started its own blog. Interesting thing to note is that the community guy who is behind it is an Indian called Mario Sundar :-) [Update: Mario has a personal blog too, and he blogs about his involvement with the Linkedin blog here]

Linkedin has quite a few bloggers who are passionate evangelists of the networking site, like Guy Kawasaki, Penelope Trunk and Vincent himself.

It'll be interesting to note how Linkedin positions the blog. The stated goal is:

to not only help you leverage LinkedIn more effectively but also to provide you a sounding board for all things LinkedIn. So, if you’re looking for a singular information source on LinkedIn with regular updates on upcoming product features, tips-and-tricks, and events or if you’d just like to hear about all the fun stuff associated with working at LinkedIn, you have reached the right place.

On a related note, here is another factoid that Vincent shared:

LinkedIn, the best-known career social network, reported 89% growth in members from 2005-2006. The site has grown from 85,000 members in its first year to over eight million members.

Some large US employers are conducting searches on social networking sites to recruit highly qualified prospects that may not be actively job hunting. Today's job hunters are not only looking at online classifieds, but also are likely to view themselves as brands to be marketed online.

Full article here.

It's interesting to note that when I joined Linkedin (was among the first 20,000 people to join) the site did not have a "career" focus, but a pure "business" focus, but over the years the focus has shifted to career networking as I guess sales, VC, marketing and deal-making does not make such a large proportion of requests (I'm guessing. I hope the Linkedin blog gives us some figures :-) as career change. Increasingly in India I am being contacted by recruiters to reach out to my contacts for job, through linkedin. One only hopes that Linkedin offers city areas to be shown in countries like India, like it enables zip search in the US.