Quick Review of LinkedIn Apps for Blogging

I was amped today to see that LinkedIn has launched its application platform. The first thing that I wanted to do was add my blogs to the site to enhance their visibility to my business network. I started to use the WordPress application.

I installed it, and within minutes realized that it was only intended for WordPress.com blogs and not for self-hosted WordPress installations. Boo!!! My website, and my current pet blog project IT Hire Wire are both self-hosted WordPress installs.

You can try to enter your self-hosted blog, but you won’t get very far

I tweeted Mario Sundar to see if there is self-hosted compatibility coming. We’ll see what he says.

—UPDATE 10-30—
The WordPress App DOES support self-hosted. They’ve been working out the kinks. Read the tweets from @tellyworth. So far I’ve found that you can only have one feed into the WordPress LinkedIn App. When you add it to your profile, I don’t think it appears on your Public Profile. It also appears before your resume. I’m not sure that’s a great User-Interface. If you add a lot of apps to your LinkedIn profile, it has the potential to cloud your personal brand. I see these apps as additional interesting areas of content to be explored AFTER your review my credentials.
—END UPDATE—

Not to be defeated, I moved on to trying out Blog Link by SixApart. That experience was a whole lot more rewarding, but still has a bit of a caveat.

When you first install Blog Link you’ll notice on the “My Contacts” tab that it immediately goes out into network and pulls blog entries from any connections that have a blog listed as a website on their profile. This was amazing! I found blogs I never knew existed, which just goes to show you that you ought to list yours in your LinkedIn profile. Then I had a look at the “By Me” tab, and I had a couple of hiccups.

Check out your By Me tab and adjust the websites you have listed on your profile accordingly

While the links that I list in my profile for my blogs are for humans to use and get to the front end of the content, the best URL to get a clean feed into a feed reader is much different. In the case of this website, krisrzepkowski.com, the best human readable URL to get to the front-end content is http://www.krisrzepkowski.com/blog/work/, however the way to get to work-related entries into a feed reader is to use my feed URL (http://www.krisrzepkowski.com/blog/work/feed/). Using this, I won’t be feeding my stories of deer hunting and hanging out with the kids into my LinkedIn profile.

With IT Hire Wire, the best feed to get my postings on the multi-author blog turns out to be a feedburner URL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/ItHireWireKrisRzepkowski). Again, this is not the human-readable content URL I would want someone to click on within my profile. Because Blog Link opted for simplicity (which I admire), by using only the websites you have listed in your profile instead of requesting en explicit feed URL, you need to make a choice.

I’d prefer Blog Link to request feed URLs for the entries it shows in By Me, and allow your profile website to be separate. One last question on Blog Link. What do the up/down arrows do? I can’t for the life of me figure that one out.

Does anyone know what this does?

—UPDATE 10-29—
I figured out that arrow thing. It actually scrolls the entries, it’s just an unconventional control, and depending on what is showing on your screen, it is difficult to see that anything changed.
—END UPDATE—

Let me know what your thoughts are on the new blog integrations with LinkedIn. The intent of these apps is noble, and will build a significant traffic stream of business related readers the likes of which we haven’t yet seen.