This is from a promo for the next SFBIG event and I have no idea what it means. Maybe someone out there can help me translate?

“Sure there are brands with VERY specific demographics they need to reach, but often, even with colossal wastage the online ad network is much more efficient. You get much better price per performance on networks. Why? Well, even if your creative performs better on the branded site, it will do so by about 20%-30% for the same creative; but you get between 3x to 30x better pricing on the network you do the math. Unfortunately most brands dont.”

- Sean Cummings, Director of Marketing, Ask.com

Plaxo and AOL are getting together to promote Plaxo as an address book synchronization service to AOL members and AIM users. From the InformationWeek article:

Under terms of the agreement, AOL will integrate Plaxo services to enable its members and AIM users to easily import, export, and synchronize contact information in their Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and third party Web-based e-mail address books with their AOL Mail and AIM Mail address books. This will also enable AIM users to automatically pull contact information from third party address books to pre-populate, or build upon, their Buddy List features. In addition, the agreement will enable AOL members, AIM users and Plaxo members to detect AIM presence information from within Plaxo and Plaxo-enabled platforms, such as Outlook and Outlook Express. A new AOL/AIM Screen Name field will be added to both Plaxo and Outlook ‘v-cards’ and the familiar AOL Running Man icon will appear in contact lists and e-mail headers to let users know when AIM buddies are online and available to chat.

AOL has previously been very wary of sharing user information (I know first hand from spending several months getting an adserver contract approved to serve on AOL!) and this is the kind of deal I don’t think we would have seen getting done even a year ago (even though Jason Calcanis speculated AOL would buy Plaxo back in 2004). It’s a new web-centric non-walled garden AOL I guess! As part of the deal, apparently the initial “update everyone” spam will be taken out of the equation. Here’s the official blog view. We’ll see how it goes, but congrats to the Plaxo guys — this should give them a decent runway to make a go of things.

LinkedIn won a mini-award: it was named as a “Quintessential Careers Site”. Cool!

[Work-related] Interesting post here that “LinkedIn should open up the network through an open API and “Powered by” type services” in specific reference to LinkedIn for Groups, our product for helping affinity groups (such as academic and corporate alumni groups, conferences and industry associations) establish a presence on LinkedIn for their membership. I actually like the idea a lot of LinkedIn becoming a “federated identity provider”, and it is perfect for someone who has already gone through the approval process for a LinkedIn group. We basically require a two-step process where there is a pre-approval of someone’s email OR a manual post-approval of a person’s application to join a group, in conjunction with that person clicking the invitation link (which groups send out via email or put on their website). So for an alumni organization, they’re able to “pre-approve” all the alums for which they have current email addresses and for those that sign up with a different address they can then just post-approve them.

Given someone being allowed into a group, and logging in with their LinkedIn username and password, however, we can then provide partner services to these group users. This is something we’d love to do. Is it a top priority for us right now - unfortunately not just yet - but it is on my list to look at in more depth and we’ll look to do more over time with this specific to groups. There are plenty of cool partner applications we could power/enable with the right structure.

Dave Taylor helps answer the question that sometimes occurs: “Why would I bother with networking sites like LinkedIn?” It has some great information quoted from Liz Ryan, who runs WorldWIT, Women in Technology. Dave also has answers to questions like “How do I subscribe to an RSS feed?” or “What is the Windows Registry File?”. Well worth checking out.

SiliconBeat (San Jose Mercury News) covers some of the new functionality that LinkedIn has provided to SimplyHired.com. They have a fabulous jobs search engine, with over 3 million jobs now. On SimplyHired you can see how you might relate to the job via the people in your LinkedIn network. Matt also mentions Fred Wilson’s post about coming around and using LinkedIn as a hiring tool.

In Business 2.0 this week there is a great success story of Stephen Harris, who found a job using LinkedIn. He was able to get an inside connection to somebody at the company using LinkedIn; one of his contacts used to work at his target company and he was unaware of this. This person was able to make a referral inside the company and get his resume in the hands of the hiring manager. All around a great story.

Here’s a Job posting I stumbled on within LinkedIn Jobs for “Vice President, CMT Dukes of Hazzard Institute”. Wow, sounds like a pretty interesting job to me — not my specialty precisely — but fascinating nonetheless, a dream job for someone!

Found this blog posting about LinkedIn Jobs: This is a pretty cool setup. Next to each job that matches my search criteria, LinkedIn shows me who posted the job and how many degrees I am removed from that person. If I investigate a particular job title, with one more click I can see all the hiring managers in my network at that company.

The LinkedIn JobsInsider is now available for download on download.com and it is very cool, it allows you as a job seeker to see what people you might know working at a company where you have found a job listing, on Monster, CareerBuilder or HotJobs. It is a browser companion and only shows up when you are on these sites and have found a relevant job listing. You don’t have to be a LinkedIn user to search LinkedIn Jobs, but you’ll need to sign up as a user in order to get value out of the JobsInsider.

LinkedIn is about to hit 2 million users, probably on Tuesday. You heard it here first!

LinkedIn showing up at supercross in San Francisco. Mark Kvamme (director) is the team owner for MDK Motorsports.

Charlene Li (Forrester analyst) has a blog that discusses LinkedIn Jobs and is worth reading. I’ve never actually met Charlene in person, though I have met many of her colleagues. I like some of her viewpoints on the market and I think it’s great that more analysts are joining the analyst blogging pioneers.

Looks like Jeff Clavier picked up on the Peoplesoft stuff that’s been out there, looking at his own LinkedIn network. I also noticed that the AP (here at Forbes.com) picked up some of the LinkedIn figures as well. Interesting stuff.

We at LinkedIn have been talking with several members of the press about the impending Peoplesoft layoffs (Contra Costa Times story) and the numbers are pretty impressive. Peoplesoft has 11,000 employees, and almost half of them (about 5,500) are now on LinkedIn. We’ve seen almost 4,000 of these signups in the last 60 days! Several blogs by Peoplesoft employees are encouraging others to join LinkedIn. For some, this may be a bit late to line things up for themselves right out of the gate, post-layoff. People are better served by seeing networking and keeping in contact with past co-workers and others as an ongoing part of their careers…