LinkedIn has expanded the capability of their social network by adding collaborative features in the form of nine applications, such as sharing power-point presentations and your blog with one’s colleagues. This is a fantastic expansion and will allow for a richer collaborative experience with business contacts and colleagues, but…

As users we will need tighter and more flexible privacy controls. LinkedIn cannot afford to follow Facebook’s path, which was to expand communicative and collaborative features before the necessary flexibility of privacy settings was in place. Since that time, Facebook has set industry standards with regard to detailed and useful privacy controls–they deserve credit for that.

As LinkedIn rolls out these new features, what will they do to expand controls for grouping one’s contacts, especially insofar as each contact can see one’s particular usage of an application? How will they create finer gradations of privacy within the applications?

For instance, do you want all your vacations and travels highlighted for all of your business contacts to see, or just some of them? More importantly, how easy will this be for the user? Many users have been mixing business with social contacts for some time now on Facebook and other OSNs, but have remained disciplined in their usage of LinkedIn. These new LinkedIn features, along with expanded LinkedIn Group capabilities, provide an opportunity to rethink that process.

It’s important that the controls keep pace with what will undoubtedly be rapid expansion of the sharing of personal information with one’s business contacts. While this collaboration can be wildly productive and transformative, we know it produces sharply unintended results. See Brian Solis’s discussion of Bono and Facebook as a reminder of the–perhaps unintended–power of the social web.

Jeremiah Owyang recently discussed LinkedIn’s bright future, especially the fact that they have secured significant funding, hence securing their ability to “go shopping” for collaborative technologies that can add features quickly to the service. Great! I agree with Owyang’s insightful conclusions; he expects LinkedIn to “offer more collaboration between colleagues and connections to happen outside of the firewall where IT doesn’t have control.” If LinkedIn learns from the past mistakes of online social networks, thereby providing detailed privacy controls as these new features are launched–not after–then we can spend more time basking in the creative potential of our newfound collaboration, and less time concerning ourselves with the unintended consequences of one-size-fits-all communication.

+++

[Here is the original LinkedIn blog post on their adding of Applications that feature Amazon (books), Box.net, Google, Huddle, Six Apart (blogs), SlideShare (multimedia), Tripit, and WordPress (blogs) "...as well a Company Buzz application developed by LinkedIn." This is an eventual game-changer for LinkedIn.]

It is not often that I tell people they “must read” something. Bill McKibben eloquently tells us in this article why it is necessary for us to act now to make sure our governments collaborate on climate change agreements in the next 3 years.

I will say this at the outset– I believe him. I believe the scientist Rajendra Pachauri who McKibben quotes as giving humanity a hard deadline of 2012 — if we do not begin actions to lower emissions before that date, we will set off irrecoverable chain reactions in the environment.

The goal is to roll back our CO2 emissions from 385 to 350ppm (parts per million).

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

If ever there were a time for me to proclaim “this is the paradigmatic example of why social and collaborative media are crucial,” now would be it. If you’ve ever asked, “what’s the point of Web 2.0?”, here is the moment to jump on and get involved. Those of us who are using social and collaborative media on the web more than others owe it to humanity to pass this along in whatever form we think will make the most difference. If you blog, please consider writing about 350.org. If you use a social network, consider posting the URL; if you use Flickr then consider joining the Flickr group. McKibben is not an expert on Internet collaboration and new media, but he certainly gets its potential for results:

We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that “350″ stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

And with that, I will reproduce the article in its entirety after the jump. It’s that important.

The World at 350
A Last Chance for Civilization
By Bill McKibben

Even for Americans, constitutionally convinced that there will always be a second act, and a third, and a do-over after that, and, if necessary, a little public repentance and forgiveness and a Brand New Start — even for us, the world looks a little Terminal right now.

It’s not just the economy. We’ve gone through swoons before. It’s that gas at $4 a gallon means we’re running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It’s that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It’s that everything is so inextricably tied together. It’s that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and on about the “limits to growth” suddenly seem… how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn’t morning in America, it’s dusk on planet Earth.

There’s a number — a new number — that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA’s Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued — and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper — “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.” Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points — massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them — that we’ll pass if we don’t get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer’s insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

So it’s a tough diagnosis. It’s like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don’t bring it down right away, you’re going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you’re lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It’s like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.

In this case, though, it’s worse than that because we’re not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas — hard. Instead of slowing down, we’re pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year — two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.

And suddenly, the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. Apparently, we’ve managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.

And don’t forget: China is building more power plants; India is pioneering the $2,500 car, and Americans are converting to TVs the size of windshields which suck juice ever faster.

Here’s the thing. Hansen didn’t just say that, if we didn’t act, there was trouble coming; or, if we didn’t yet know what was best for us, we’d certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His phrase was: “…if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada’s efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta’s tar sands.)

We’re the ones who kicked the warming off; now, the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun’s heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them — to reverse course. Here’s the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord. When December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to converge on Copenhagen to sign a treaty — a treaty that would go into effect at the last plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric CO2.

If we did everything right, says Hansen, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.

More likely, though, we’re the Coyote — because “doing everything right” means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they’re supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way we made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones, so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.

That’s possible — we launched a Marshall Plan once, and we could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But in a month when the President has, once more, urged us to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that seems unlikely. In a month when the alluring phrase “gas tax holiday” has danced into our vocabulary, it’s hard to see (though it was encouraging to see that Clinton’s gambit didn’t sway many voters). And if it’s hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as we do.

Still, as long as it’s not impossible, we’ve got a duty to try. In fact, it’s about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next 18 months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can’t do this one light bulb at a time. And if this 350.org campaign is a Hail Mary pass, well, sometimes those passes get caught.

We do have one thing going for us: This new tool, the Web which, at least, allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that “350″ stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

Hansen’s words were well-chosen: “a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet that civilization may not.

Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won’t exist, at least not for long, this side of 350. That’s the limit we face.

Bill McKibben is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is The Bill McKibben Reader.

When we first created this show, we had visions of promoting it by tapping into the natural fanbase of hackers, geeks, and enthusiasts found all over the Internet. The uber-talented cast–Chris Nickerson, Luke McOmie (Pyr0), and Ryan Jones–have friends far and wide both within the hacker community and beyond. That alone, with almost no effort, was enough to gain fan interest and much press when the show premiered last year. Within a few days we had a wikipedia entry, we were rising up on Digg, and other kinds of social and collaborative media were used to embrace the show, primarily because it struck a nerve with actual security professionals. They are so used to inauthentic portrayals of hacking, that when they find something real, they love it.

Ori Neidich (one of my partners) and I had talked about what we could do for TruTV (then CourtTV) in terms of promotion on the net. We knew that we could get a huge following for the show that would translate into big ratings for Turner Broadcasting, on a very small budget. All we needed was cooperation from them. After all, it’s a Faustian bargin when you sell a show–they own the rights!

TruTv/CourtTV had little interest in promoting the show at all, let alone allowing an Internet campaign to be associated officially with them. This, for a show that they told us was the highest-scoring of all of their test-piloted shows in the history of the network. What gives?

This may be indicative of television networks’ lack of understanding in general as to what online media can do for the marketing of a show, for very little investment. Grassroots campaigns are nothing new to Hollywood, but for this level of budgeting, they may not have realized just how much they could have gotten for free. Ori and I would not have charged extra for our time. Certainly Chris, Luke, and Ryan did an amazing job promoting the show on their own with no extra bucks–my hat goes off to them. Even when Chris sent the network a dossier on all that had been accomplished for free, the network barely responded and probably did not give it more than 2 minutes of thought. Really, Turner Broadcasting? Can you afford to turn away from social media and internet marketing in general? You’re ok with a little website that does next-to-nothing? Is that how you want to promote your tv shows, especially the ones that appeal to Internet-types?

SEO could also stand for Simply Effective Outstanding content. So it could be: SEOCON

Let’s look at each of these SEO techniques by David Leonhardt (one of the SEO guys) and see which ones actually require rolling up of sleeves and creating great content:

1. Be bold. Use the <b> </b> tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Okay, that’s a trick. Fine. Will do.

2. Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.

This requires creation of great content.

3. Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Does anyone really go to this kind of trouble for SEO? Perhaps. But it’s still not worth your time unless you can easily do it.

4. Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

This requires great content. And, btw, what would we consider to be in the category of “ezine”?

5. First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won’t follow additional links to the same page.

Okay, neat trick. Thanks David.

6. Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

This is a great suggestion. And guess what? It requires great content.

7.  Article exchanges. You’ve heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else’s article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)

I agreee – to an extent. And guess what? This requires the creation of great content.

8. Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Okay David. Neat trick.

9. Not anchor text. Don’t overdo the anchor text. You don’t want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation – something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, “Gumbo Pudding Pop” occasionally, “Get gumbo pudding pops” as well, “Gumbo-flavored pudding pops” some other times, etc.

Yes, but this is contingent on…you guessed it… great content in the first place.

10. Site map. A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It’s called the navigation bar.

Fine. Agreed. Though this will not help you if it points to bad content.

Moral: Content is still … _ _ _ _ !

Freecycle.org is starting to gain more momentum. They are one of a number of online forums that facilitate the exchange of…well…..stuff — keeping all sorts of items out of landfills by providing an opportunity to give it away for free to someone else in your community. It’s a more efficient structure than leaving it on the sidewalk or having a garage sale. My question is… why are they still using Yahoo Groups as their primary means of interaction? This site is in dire need of some Web 2.0.

They are likely on a shoestring budget, therefore if you are willing to help them implement tags and their own online social apparatus, perhaps they would welcome the help.

Other than the obvious Craig’s List, what are your experiences with competitor sites that facilitate the exchange of goods and services? Which ones are most useful?