Anyway I found this post when I was looking up some history on changes with LinkedIn as I’m just getting into it and trying to decide whether do devote my time and effort into Linkedin or Facebook since the both provide similar features for friends wanting to keep in touch and alumni.

However, given what you are saying here about the slow and manual process of setting up groups, they appear to have got their act together as then seem to be a lot more consumer / user focussed developments these days.

Cheers

Now, you haven’t identified yourself, and your IP address shows as dial-up, so I don’t really have any way to match you against previous messages to see what might have been deleted, so I can only guess that, assuming it wasn’t something I would have deleted as spam, Akismet must have caught it and automatically flagged it as spam. With it catching several hundred a day, I’m not in the habit of going through them and trying to sift out any legitimate comments. Sometimes that means some wheat gets thrown out with the chaff — I’m truly sorry if this is what happened to you. Blame the spammers who created this situation in the first place.

However, on seeing this, I did go through them just now and found about half a dozen comments that had been deleted that weren’t spam, and it wasn’t obvious to me why they were flagged. So hopefully yours were in that batch.

If proactive alumni put the effort of forming a group when their alma mater is falling down on the job, is Linkedin going to turn over the investment of the individuals to the institution?

I’ve read that most alumni organizations are actually separate not for profits with their own boards of directors, but there’s no level I wouldn’t expect any “institution” to sink to if they think they could get money.

This is an interesting gray area where the real value of “user generated content” is bumping up against the potential value of official backing for an online presence.