I joined LinkedIn a few months ago at the invitation of a colleague. My first thought was, “Can I really manage another social networking site?” But I have been pleasantly surprised by LinkedIn. It seems to be geared to those looking for a job or making business contacts.

I’ve connected with a few librarians who I have never met (not in person anyway) like A-list blogging librarian Sarah Houghton-Jan. I’ve even been contacted by a few friends of friends who are applying for jobs at PLCMC.

Once you set up your profile and make some connections, it’s interesting to see how close we are all connected. Remember the six degrees of separation? LinkedIn works a little like that.

For instance Sarah is listed as a 1st level connection for me. I can browse her connections and see that she is connected to Stephen Abram. So now Abram is listed as a 2nd level connection for me through Sarah.

My favorite part of LinkedIn is the Q&A. You can throw a question out there about anything and get some really good responses from people all around the world in all different professions. Answers are ranked by the person who asked the question. Each question has a “best answer” selected.

I have selected the areas that interest me and subscribed to them via RSS feeds. I mostly just read the responses to questions that interest me, but occasionally a questions gets put out there that I can’t resist answering. It must be my inner-librarian! I made it a mini-goal for 2008 to have at least one answer selected as a best answer.

I was surprised to log in yesterday and see that I scored two best answers this week! One in the area of Occupational Training and one in the area of Professional Networking…and the year is only 1/12th of the way over!

So my question to you is, do you use LinkedIn and how do you use it?

1-866-WEB-4111

If you are away from your computer and need a question answered here’s a service that will do it for you. The company is Look Up Web for Me. It’s a toll free call and a free service. You name the question and they look up the answer.

I decided to test the service out. I called and was put on hold while a “Search Maestro” was located for me. By the way Search Maestros get paid $10-15 per hour and work from home! I was on hold for a few seconds then Jen answered my call. Pleasant and easy to understand Jen was willing to look up pretty much anything I asked. When I first read about the service through a question posed by founder Altaf Boghani on LinkedIn, I was a little suspicious. It sounds too good to be true. Right now the service is privately funded and I wonder how they will generate income in the future. Maybe it will be via phone ads as Google 411 plans to.

In all it’s a great idea. I can’t tell you how many times I have called home, a friend, or even the library to have someone do a quick Internet search for me, and that’s exactly where the idea for this business came from. According to a Jan. 11, 2008 press release, Boghani researched and found that people call family and friends to look up a wide range of information on the Web.

The most frequent categories were directions, store hours and locations, train times, traffic jams, weather, address confirmation, hotels, flight information, phone info from an organization’s web page, and doctor’s number from an HMO Web site.

Heck, my mom called me tonight to ask how many calories are in a potato!

I’m curious to see how librarians view this service? Do we have some competition? Or is this just another great resource? I’m also curious to know why people, my mom included, don’t call their libraries for information like this.