What's Up with Linked Intelligence?

If you’ve actually visited the site and aren’t just reading this in your RSS reader, you’ve probably noticed some pretty drastic changes, and maybe even a few bugs the past couple of days. The broken links should now be fixed, and the navigation is all working again. Not sure when I’ll have all the images back up, but soon.

As you may have surmised, Linked Intelligence is no longer a part of the b5media network. It was by mutual agreement, all on good terms. In the simplest terms, 6 posts a week doesn’t work for me, and less than 6 posts a week doesn’t work for them. I had a great experience at b5 — love the staff and my fellow b5 bloggers who I got to know.

But there’s more to the story…

Actually, I’m going to be phasing out Linked Intelligence. I have a few more posts I want to write here, and I do plan to leave the site up indefinitely. There’s a lot of good content I’ve created here over the past couple of years, hundreds of inbound links and thousands of monthly visitors. I don’t want to just toss that away and leave a bunch of dead links around the web.

So why am I phasing out Linked Intelligence?

It’s a combination of things:

1. I’m incredibly busy with other things. This is first and foremost. Between promoting our new book The Emergence of The Relationship Economy, the many projects and prospective clients we’re working on at Link to Your World, my ongoing work as Entrepreneurs Guide at About.com, and so on, I need to reduce the number of things on my plate, and this blog is lower priority.

2. LinkedIn is doing some things very well now that they weren’t doing when this blog started. LinkedIn didn’t even have their own blog until a year ago. It got off to kind of a slow start, but now they routinely announce and explain new features, offer tips & tricks, highlight LinkedIn media coverage and (my favorite new edition) share user success stories. I created this blog to fill a need, and LinkedIn is finally filling much of it themselves.

3. LinkedIn is doing some things far worse now than they were two years ago. LinkedIn has become simply impossible to deal with as someone trying to evangelize their platform. I could give my own personal dirty laundry list a mile long, but I won’t — what they do to other people is more than enough. When I see how LinkedIn continues to ignore and/or mistreat some of its strongest evangelists and power users and refuses to address issues that have been going on for years, I simply no longer want to have my personal brand tied to their brand (that’s OK – they probably feel the same way, strangely enough).

I think LinkedIn is a great tool, and I will continue to use it, advocate it to my business associates, and train clients on using it effectively, but I’m just not going to waste any more of my time promoting it when they are not just unsupportive, but downright hostile to those of us who try to do so.

I’ll be writing some more about this in the near future — not because I hate LinkedIn, but because I love it. I think their current policies are going to drive it into the ground, and I hope that some of the investors and executives are listening, because right now, the real conversation that’s going on among LinkedIn users doesn’t seem to be having much impact on the decision-makers.