Silly stats du jour. If you search LinkedIn for weblog, you'll get 46 individuals, while a search for blog will return 42. Amazingly enough, none of the Trott will show up with those keywords, Mena has weblogs (32 results) and blogging (40 results) in her profile. With 18 blogs, 21 blogger and 3 bloggers, that's a mere 202 profiles mentioning weblog-related activities on LinkedIn among my 26,100+ network (I have no idea how many individuals are on LinkedIn, and I believe I cannot search beyond my network). Now I'm done with trying to turnaround LinkedIn's search engine limitations.
And Ben Trott will not show up with any of those keywords. But that's not LinkedIn's fault.
And, why is this significant?
I started this post by the word "silly", that's probably as significant as it gets ;-)
More seriously, I was looking for bloggers amongst the LinkedIn crowd, and stumbled on the limitations of its search engine, which, for example, is incapable of dealing with plurals.
So if people enter LinkedIn thinking that one can find them easily, they'd better think about the keywords they put in their profiles.
I think I understand what you're saying. The webloggers are using LinkedIn to be, "linked in", like *tribe* and *friendster* but the crowd is looking for professional/work contacts and people are using it like a social sphere -- which is why you think the keywords are not being utilised effectively. Is that right?
I have to admit, I'm not convinced in the utility of these kinds of interactions. Can you point out instances where and how it was (is) useful for you or others? Just curious.
So far, LinkedIn is still intriguing for me, and remains the online version of a British Club. Almost all connections I have there are from people I got in touch with outside of it, and in majority due to the blogosphere (I didn't try that keyword ;-).
The professional nature of LinkedIn is obvious, but people may tend to use it differently, as you hint. That's why I think unless they make it better for gorwing a network rather than more difficult than existing means (and I count Google and weblogs in them!), I fail to see where they can make money out of it.
As for giving one instance where it's been useful to me or someone I know... So far, the apprentice is still learning, and that's always useful in the padawan's philosophy :-).
The form you fill is a little short of fields. There should be at least a "web site URL", an "interests" and a keywords" fields, all optionnals.
Search form itself could be improved.