[Ed. note: This is a guest blog post from Ron LaPedis, Principal at Seacliff Partners and describes his journey from being laid off to becoming an entrepreneur with some help from his LinkedIn network]

I am an entrepreneur who was always afraid to quit my day job. I sold rock concert T-shirts in college and even after I began work in the Silicon Valley, I started selling high-end fountain pens from Realpens.com and writing articles for industry magazines. These were little more than hobbies until my first pink slip showed up, after I’d spent nearly 29 years in the industry. After exiting the building and taking stock, it was obvious that networking was the answer. The scuttlebutt was that few people were being hired off the street and recommendations to managers were worth their weight in gold. Using LinkedIn’s advanced search feature, I reached out to old friends and co-workers for references but instead discovered that many of them were independent consultants and actually making a living at it.

While still searching for a full-time job, I began the work to become a trusted adviser on my favorite topic – protecting businesses and people when something goes wrong. I used LinkedIn Answers to get tips and tricks from my contacts on how to set up a consulting business including the need for liability insurance and why I should incorporate as an LLC. To prove my credibility, I used the WordPress application on LinkedIn to publish my regular blog post entries on to my network. An Australian friend of mine saw my posts on LinkedIn and recommended me to a company in Los Angeles. My first contract came quickly, in fact before the ink was dry on my incorporation papers. After that I was requested to author an online article and was paid to write and give two educational sessions at a technology conference – and this all started with a LinkedIn contact.

I am absolutely convinced of the power offered by LinkedIn and I tell all of my friends to build their networks, use the search feature to find people at targeted companies, and get recommendations from co-workers.

Jeff Weiner has updated his profile from President to CEO of LinkedIn.

Six months ago, Jeff started at LinkedIn running our day-to-day operations as President of the company. During that time we’ve achieved record operating and financial results. Prior to LinkedIn, Jeff was an Executive in Residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. Previously, he spent over seven years in key leadership roles at Yahoo!, managing businesses and products that reached over half a billion consumers worldwide. Jeff’s experience building multiple products on a global scale is highly relevant to LinkedIn and will be critical as we continue to grow the LinkedIn professional network around the world.

I look forward to working with Jeff as he leads the company. He and I share the same vision for Linkedin: connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. In the new world of work, every professional should establish their own brand online; every professional engages their network in order to connect with the people and information they need to compete and succeed.

While Jeff leads the company, I will focus on some big picture strategic issues for Linkedin – how Linkedin evolves to become more and more essential to professionals seeking to stay informed and find the right resources to accomplish their tasks fast and effectively.

We’re very excited about Jeff’s role as CEO, leading the company towards helping all professionals become connected and successful.

Reid Hoffman
Founder & Executive Chairman

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Ed. note. Check out Techmeme for related stories here or click through these individual links: TechCrunch, All Things Digital, New York Times, Associated Press, USA Today and Business Week.

[Ed. note: This is a guest post by Dawn Jordan, former operations vice president at Bank of America, whose job was eliminated last year. Also, check out Dawn's blog series on the Wall Street Journal where she describes her quest for a job in the midst of these trying economic times]

On any given day, it seems I could attend an event and meet the individual who will be key to landing my next job.  This is because my email inbox is constantly loaded with invitations and announcements for upcoming professional networking events.

My challenge isn’t a lack of time, interest or need to attend these networking functions, it is lack of money.

Pre-layoff I thought little of registration fees for such activities but post-layoff is another matter.  Their expense has been an unanticipated cost of unemployment.  As a result, I too often find myself foregoing events that  I would prefer to attend.  The longer I am unemployed, the more often I expect this to happen.

Inevitably, I find myself torn between feeling as though I can’t afford to go to an event but that I also can’t afford not to go.

What makes matters worse is that career service industry experts agree networking is one of the most critical components of a job search.  They say that especially in weaker  economies you are more likely to find your career opportunity through networking and not on job boards.

This is where online social media tools such as  LinkedIn, and Meetup.com help.  They allow me to extend my reach and meet people for low or no cost.  When you consider typical networking expenses can easily exceed $400 per month, leveraging these resources is a no-brainer.

One of the ways I use LinkedIn to extend my networking budget through the “Groups and Associations”.  I look for local chapters of organizations as well as groups in the functions and industries where I desire to work.

I join groups and then contact members on an individual basis.  If they are located near me I’ll request to physically meet, otherwise my goal is a phone call.  The shared group connection makes it easy to connect and increases the likelihood they will make time to talk.  Long-term, I retain connections to organizations and peers that can continue to contribute to my professional growth.

Hi everyone.  My name is Nico Posner, and I am the product manager responsible for our international sites here at LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a global network of over 42 million professionals from every country around the world, with approximately half of our member base outside the United States. Our mission at LinkedIn is to connect the world’s professionals, and we would like to do this in as many languages as possible. A frequent request from our members is to offer the LinkedIn website in their native language. Today, the LinkedIn website is available in four languages: English, Spanish, French and German (we allow users to offer their profiles in over 40 languages), but we’d like to extend that to as many professionals as possible around the globe by offering additional languages.

Currently, we are investigating the best way to translate our site into more languages. Since this is a decision that will impact millions of our users, we wanted to hear from our members on what they thought were some of the most effective ways to make this happen. Fortunately, some of the best professional experts in this area are members of the LinkedIn community, so we were able to leverage their insights through a direct survey. The chart below outlines the responses we got from over 12,000 professionals this past week.

Austin Arensberg is the Business Development Manager for Prime Energy Investments, a private renewable energy investment fund. My primary responsibilities are to identify and screen potential investment opportunities across multiple countries in Southeast Asia and China.

LinkedIn is one of my favorite tools to gain market knowledge and meet key industry contacts that lead to actionable investment opportunities. I particularly enjoy participating in discussions within groups, where I have learned about country-specific regulations, new promising implementations of clean energy technologies, and local conferences and events to expand networking opportunities.

Recently I wanted to learn more about companies building renewable energy power projects utilizing methane gas from landfills in China. At the time, I frankly knew little of that industry in China. Before I even began researching on Google and through relevant trade journals, I found and joined the Waste Management & Recycling Professionals  group on Linkedin and posted a discussion asking for investment proposals. The response was tremendous and within a few hours I was speaking on the phone with various professionals each with over fifteen years of experience in the industry in China. While normally getting access to market experts takes significant time, LinkedIn’s groups offered me an invaluable yet comfortable medium for interested parties to quickly connect and share knowledge.

I thought I would write my very first guest blog post on the quick transition I made from author to professional speaker and how LinkedIn helped me achieve this.

After spending 18 hours a day on my start-up, the lack of sleep finally got to me and I realised that although I have a very creative mind, the day to day detail of running a business was not what I was good at. I am a salesman and proud of it. The business reached the point where I needed help but didn’t know it and luckily at this very time a partner asked to buy the majority share of the business. Very good I said and the business was sold.

With the extra time I had, I wrote 100 All-time Essentials for Entrepreneurs (Wiley / Capstone – March 2009) and Freesourcing (Wiley / Capstone – September 2009), which will be released later this year. I was first offered speaking opportunities at Schools and Universities to both undergraduates and MBA courses. The new contacts on the MBA courses invited me to speak at their companies on the story behind the business, the books and my ideas for start-ups in the current economy.

With all of this attention on speaking I thought I should formalise the opportunity and sent out a note to all my LinkedIn contacts describing how I advanced my career and am willing to come and speak at any events and functions for a fee. The response has been overwhelming and I have had to turn down speaking engagements which is both good and bad. Good because there are five in my family and I really enjoy spending time with them all and bad because of all the missed opportunities to network with the business communities I have never met before.

I am really enjoying life at the moment and I have to put it down to my new found ability to network using all the social media sites around. For friends I use Facebook; for day-to-day I use Twitter; but for business I use LinkedIn. Use your precious time wisely and balance your work and life.

I’m excited to announce that last weekend marked the launch of a new way for professionals to leverage the power of LinkedIn: our first native application for the Palm Pre.  For those of you lucky enough to have purchased a new Palm Pre, you’ll find LinkedIn as one of the free applications immediately available in the Palm Pre application catalog.

For those of you familiar with our iPhone application, you’ll notice that we’ve taken a decidedly different approach with this first version for the Palm Pre.  We designed this application from the ground up for the new webOS platform.  As a result, you’ll find the application features a simple but elegant set of features that integrate seamlessly into the platform.

With LinkedIn for the Palm Pre, you can easily view up-to-date information about any of your LinkedIn connections.  We’ve also seamlessly integrated LinkedIn search into the interface – typing in a name will not only search your connections, but will also reach across the cloud to LinkedIn to search the entire LinkedIn network in the background.

Why walk into any interview, sales call, or client meeting without knowing the details of who you are meeting with?  With LinkedIn, you’re able to type that name in a few minutes before the meeting, and walk in an expert.

LinkedIn for Palm Pre also debuts, for the first time, the ability to truly connect on the go.  Not only does the new application offer the ability to send invitations, but also a clear and simple inbox to accept invitations.

We know that more and more professionals expect the ability to have the power of their professional networks wherever they go.  We’re extremely excited to be a part of the launch of the Palm Pre, and this is one of many exciting new advances in mobile services that we’re planning for 2009.

To learn more, we’ve posted a new page on the LinkedIn website about the whole family of LinkedIn mobile products.

P.S. The most common question we have received to date is, “When will LinkedIn integrate with the new Palm Synergy address book platform?”  Rest assured, this is something that we’ve already begun development on.  Stay tuned.

First off, thanks to everyone who attended the first LinkedIn Tech Talk session featuring the creator of SCALA, Martin Odersky, along with Nick Kallen of Twitter and David Pollak of LIFT. We had over 150 attendees at the event although we had originally planned only for 100. In addition to the audience here at Mountain View, we also live streamed the event to over ~1000 viewers, with over 140 of them viewing it live.

We’d also like to thank the following participants for submitting questions that drove the panel discussion: Parag Joshi, Vladimir Bacvanski, Pradeep Pujari, Mark Wong-VanHaren, Peter Simanyi, Aden Davies, Hernan Silberman, and  LinkedIn’s Nick Dellamaggiore and Eishay Smith.

For those of you who had asked us to keep you posted of similar events in the future, we’ve created a LinkedIn group called Tech Talk Conversations where we’ll announce it first and will continue featuring discussions from LinkedIn’s own engineering community before and after the event. Feel free to join the group by clicking on the link below.

Join LinkedIn’s Tech Talk Conversations group to be informed of future events

For those of you who haven’t seen the panel discussion yet, check out the embedded video below. It’s a tad long with a running time of nearly 61 minutes, but if you’re interested in SCALA it will be well worth it.

Last week we launched the “Recruiting with LinkedIn” blog, a blog for recruiters and folks who rely on LinkedIn for their hiring needs.  There are more than half a million recruiters using LinkedIn and our enterprise solutions to find and contact top talent. But as a professional you might already know that and may have received a few interesting job opportunities.

The new “Recruiting with LinkedIn” blog contains information about leveraging LinkedIn, and especially LinkedIn Talent Advantage, to recruit the best professionals.  This blog will be a great source of information, featuring:

• Latest news about LinkedIn Talent Advantage, our enterprise recruiting solutions – new features, service/maintenance announcements, etc.
• Tips from users, or from LinkedIn staff
• Links to the latest tutorials and screencast demonstrations
• Event announcements – live events and webinars
• A peek behind the scenes here at LinkedIn
• Other interesting content – Polls, industry trends, staff interviews, etc

So, if you’re a recruiter or a hiring manager, feel free to subscribe to the the our Recruiting blog’s RSS Feed, and Twitter feed to ensure you are receiving the latest information from us.

Check out the new “Recruiting with LinkedIn” blog here

[Ed. note: This is a guest post by Rob Gorrie, Founder of Adcentricity, on how LinkedIn provides him the right connections to like minded business professionals and how it has also brought him different opportunities since he joined. please note: check back in later tomorrow for video from last week's LinkedIn Tech Talk]

LinkedIn has been an invaluable resource for me and my colleagues at Adcentricity. Whether I’m connecting with potential investors, or helping my sales team with leads, the connection LinkedIn provides to business-minded people is a veritable goldmine.

Some of my most profitable connections have come from contacts via LinkedIn. For example, I have actually had potential tier one and two investors reach out to me to discuss a potential investment in my company, Adcentricity. From a sales perspective, I have received a number of senior executives in the agency business contact me to learn more about the Adcentricity model, while also fielding a number of requests from networks that would like to partner with us because they see the value we can provide to their business.

LinkedIn is also an invaluable resource to our internal sales team. Our sales guys use my profile to browse through the high-level contacts I know as lead sources. A friendly introduction from me through LinkedIn beats a cold call any day of the week.

In short, LinkedIn is different from other online social networking tools. Every contact is there for like-minded reasons: to connect and build valuable, lasting relationships. With a network as wide as LinkedIn, every contact you need is right at your fingertips.