When a user clicks on the News heading in their LinkedIn toolbar, they now get a splash screen that outlines the different categories or channels of news they can subscribe to. There are some fairly obvious examples such as Economy, Entrepreneurship and Leadership, as well as broader categories such as Healthcare, Technology and Social Media — and a few somewhat more unusual channels too, like “Things I Carry” and “My Best Career Mistake.”

Once you pick your categories, the site shows you a redesigned LinkedIn Today page that looks very much like the front page of a magazine website: there is one larger story with a big image at the top, and then smaller stories by category. But the biggest difference between a traditional magazine and LinkedIn’s offering is that the stories on LinkedIn Today come from everywhere — hundreds of different sites and publications, from Wired to the New York Times. In other words, the site is acting more like a Flipboard-style aggregator, which probably isn’t surprising since it recently bought Flipboard competitor Pulse.

Whether or not this is just another attempt by LinkedIn to make the site more “sticky” and get users to spend more time there, it has the potential to become a real competitor to other news aggregators and providers. As I mentioned in a recent post about why it would make sense for LinkedIn to buy Pulse, one of the tools the site has going for it is an understanding of a user’s “interest graph” as it pertains to their business and/or professional life. That’s a valuable commodity.

Under former Fortune magazine editor Dan Roth — who talked about LinkedIn’s media ambitions on a panel at our recent paidContent Live conference in New York — the company has been expanding its reach for some time, including the launch of the Influencer program. That involves bringing in prominent personalities like Sir Richard Branson and giving them a place to host their writing, something that is similar to what Evan Williams is trying to do with his new company Medium (although it is focused more on literary content).

LinkedIn may not have created a “massive media empire” — as one rather breathless piece posted (on LinkedIn Today, of course) described it — but there is no question the site has media-related ambitions, and it is following through on them. And its ability to target specific users based on their interest graph gives it a potentially powerful weapon that other media entities lack.

As my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote, LinkedIn’s media ambitions began back before the company went public in 2011, but the full scope of what the company had in mind is evident in this redesign launched Thursday for iPhone and Android.

The new feed looks a heck of a lot more like Facebook’s News Feed than a digital resume service. Gone are the weird folders a user used to see on logging in, which are now replaced with a stream of information that combines both professional updates (which of your friends have new LinkedIn connections or jobs), and news stories, as well as a top bar that shows “top stories for you,” and other customizable features. Users can like or comment on stories directly from the feed, which again, provides the service with more data on user interests.

While its stock price is doing well and it’s well on its way to becoming the digital resume of choice for a lot of professionals, LinkedIn still only has 200 million registered users, which isn’t all that significant when you consider that those aren’t active users — just people with accounts. (For a point of comparison, Twitter, which is a much newer company, has 200 million users — active ones.)

LinkedIn’s business model hinges on the “talent solutions,” or the corporate recruiting arm of the company, which brought in more than 50 percent of the revenue last quarter. But that business needs users to continue uploading information to LinkedIn. When users note when they get new jobs or list their skills, they’re providing more data for recruiters and companies to evaluate, making that section of the business more valuable. And if users never visit LinkedIn, that’s a problem, as we’ve written before.

Scrolling through this feed, it’s easy to see why adding news stories and content to the LinkedIn site makes it far more engaging for users. After all, people don’t change jobs and update their LinkedIn profiles often enough to populate a timely news feed, but if I checked the LinkedIn app to find an interesting mix of technology and media news, I might be more likely to come back for a visit — not just to accept a connection.

At a paidContent Live session hosted by Slate chairman Jacob Weisberg, three media companies described a new breed of creators who are equally at ease with content and technology. This has led to the emergence of non-traditional media influencers such as comment communities at Reddit, and at Vox Media sites The Verge and SB Nation.

“In the day, if you wanted to create media, you had to start as an intern making coffee,” said Vox CEO Jim Bankoff, adding that now anyone with $100 can make a movie. He explained that this democratization of content creation has resulted, in some cases, of Vox hiring people on the basis of their comment contributions.

This has led to a culture of empowerment in which everyday people are as fluent in media as many traditional journalists. More and more, they are taking to public platforms to not just report, but to take part in the news.

Erik Martin, GM of Reddit, cited “random acts of pizza” — a community on the site that sends pizza as a gesture of support, most recently to emergency workers in Boston.

But does this new culture of public participation also has a dark side? Slate’s Weisberg pointed to Reddit’s current efforts to identify the Boston bomber, including posting a suspect’s photo on the site, as approaching vigilante justice.

“Reddit may be creating the next Richard Jewell,” said Weisberg, referring to a police officer who foiled an Atlanta Olympics bombing plot only to be falsely accused as a suspect in a traumatizing “trial by media.”

Martin said he regarded the role of Reddit employees as “groundskeepers” who helped discrete communities determine their own standards.

Dan Roth, a former Fortune editor who now oversees news on LinkedIn Today, offered a further example of how non-journalists are creating media. He described how executives like Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson are now writing regular columns in their own voices. While such contributions in traditional media typically amounted to no more than press releases, Roth said that readers’ ire at inauthenticity has forced even corporate executives to reevaluate how they write.

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on paidContent .

Pulse is one of a number of news-recommendation apps that try to apply algorithms and other filters to suggest content to users — a group that includes Zite (which was acquired by CNN in 2011) as well as News360, Flipboard and Prismatic. Pulse was one of the first to make a big splash, in part because Apple founder Steve Jobs mentioned it on stage during the launch of the original iPad, and also because the New York Times accused the company of copyright infringement for aggregating its content.

Since its launch, Pulse has grown to the point where it has about 20 million users, but it’s still seen by many as a runner-up to Flipboard in the news-recommendation market, so an acquisition in the $100-million range would likely make sense for the company and its backers.

LinkedIn is becoming a media network

For LinkedIn, meanwhile, the purchase of a service that aggregates and recommends content from a wide variety of news sources would be an interesting extension of its recent moves to bulk up the media side of its business. When the company first launched its LinkedIn Today service — which aggregated news based on which links were shared within a user’s network of contacts — it seemed to some (including me) like a side project designed to primarily to drive traffic to the site, which was mostly being used as a place to store a resume or connect with potential employers.

Since then, however, the company has made a number of other efforts on the content side that are more ambitious — directed by former Fortune magazine staffer Dan Roth — such as the launch of the Influencers program, in which the site gets prominent personalities such as Richard Branson and Reid Hoffman to blog about topics of interest to its users. In many ways, this is analogous to what alternative blogging platforms like Medium and Svbtle have been doing (and WordPress seems to be interested in doing as well). (see disclosure)

So what could LinkedIn do with something like Pulse? Peter Kafka of All Things Digital has one idea, based on a video that Dan Roth made for a Fortune app that had LinkedIn integration — so that users could see who they were connected to at a specific company that was mentioned in the news. But while this might be useful to some, it seems a lot less interesting than using it as a kind of extension of LinkedIn Today: in other words, a way of recommending content that would target users based on their interests.

It’s all about the “interest graph”

As we’ve tried to explain a number of times, this kind of “interest graph” targeting is the holy grail for both content companies and social networks. It’s the reason why Facebook is constantly tweaking its news feed, and why Twitter is pouring resources into improving recommendation filters like its Discover tab and other features — and why Google is trying so hard to get people to share and “plus one” more content through its Google+ network.

If there’s one overwhelming reality of the digital age, it’s that we are all to some extent drowning in content from an ever-growing range of sources, and we all spend an increasing amount of time trying to filter out the noise and find the signal. LinkedIn has a large and growing graph of the social-network connections between people based on their work — a graph some believe could make the company an acquisition for someone like Bloomberg — and that could potentially be very valuable for users.

So a LinkedIn-Pulse combination might start as a version of the app that functions almost exactly like the current version, but also tracks content shared by a user’s business-related graph from LinkedIn, and then grows into a larger service incorporated into the site itself. And data from such a service would likely also be very interesting to Pulse partners like the Wall Street Journal, who use the app as a secondary method of distribution and subscription revenue.

And if such a deal does end up happening, of course, a LinkedIn purchase of Pulse would be just another example of a non-media company (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) establishing a powerful foothold in an area of the business that has traditionally belonged to newspapers and magazines.

Disclosure: Automattic, the developer of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and Arvind Grover

“We don’t comment on rumors or speculation,” LinkedIn spokesman Hani Durzy told me. Pulse has not yet responded to a request for comment.

The San Francisco-based Pulse, founded in 2010, has over 20 million users across its web, iOS and Android apps. The apps pull in news from different verticals and arrange it in a graphical interface. Users can also subscribe to RSS feeds, save content to read later, and share stories. Last summer, Pulse partnered with the Wall Street Journal to make the newspaper’s paid premium content available through its app.

The reported acquisition comes at a time when LinkedIn is trying to beef up its content offerings. The career networking site already aggregates personalized news feeds for its users, and it rolled out a blogging platform last fall.

Content farms appeared on the scene several years ago, as publishers tried to figure out how to drive search traffic to their websites, since Google had become one of the top traffic sources in the industry. As SEO or search-engine optimization became a crucial part of the business, some took this principle to its logical conclusion and started creating content specifically to attract Google and profit from advertising keywords (Note: We’re going to be talking about alternative methods of monetization for content at our paidContent Live conference in April).

Content farms had an explicitly financial motive

One of the most prominent players was Demand Media, which owned eHow, an early attempt at SEO for content. The model was simple: pay a large stable of freelance writers very small amounts of money (often as little as $2 per article) to create or aggregate “service oriented” content around specific ad-heavy topics. This version of the business was more or less killed by Google via updates to its search algorithm, which pushed low-quality content further down in search results.

Walk argues that Medium and Quora’s new blogging platform (which converted what were message boards into individual blogs) as well as the blog network Svbtle and LinkedIn’s Influencer program share many of the same features as early content farms. Among other things, he says they offer:

• Article-based construction: In other words, a blog-style layout and format with multiple, dated posts written by an individual author
• Cross-promotion: Visitors come to one blog post and are shown others by the same author or different authors to try and entice them to stay
• Easy to use publishing tools: Medium and some other players offer lightweight content-creation features that make it easy to write and publish

For me at least, the main difference between what Medium and Svbtle and Quora seem to be doing and what “content farms” did is the lack of an obvious financial motive. True content farms were designed to maximize the search traffic so that they could generate advertising revenue (at one point, 30 percent of Demand Media’s revenue came from Google ads). But Svbtle and Medium, for example, don’t have advertising of any kind — although of course it’s possible that they could decide to turn on ads at some later date, once their traffic numbers justify it.

The rise of content farms for good?

Even Walk says that he sees these new platforms as “content farms for good,” meaning they are mostly focused on curation of quality content, which is why I think it’s better to think of them as curation engines rather than farms — or perhaps as “artisanal” content producers, to use a popular term. Both Svbtle and Medium are clearly putting a lot of emphasis on selecting quality contributors, since both are invitation-only, and LinkedIn seems to take this approach as well (Quora is much more open, in part because it converted its existing message boards).

LinkedIn clearly has an interest in driving traffic to its site with its Influencer content, in the hope that readers of those articles might decide to stick around or visit more often, and make use of the other things that actually produce revenue for the company. But in that sense, its program is more like what some call “content marketing,” which uses content that isn’t directly monetized as a way of promoting a brand or an advertiser’s main business.

In the end, all these platforms seem to be designed to appeal to writers who may have thoughts to contribute, but don’t necessarily want to maintain their own blog. Making that easy, and curating the results so that they are of high quality, may ultimately be a way around Google’s content-farm algorithms, but in the end it doesn’t really matter if higher-quality content is what gets produced. In that sense at least, Google’s efforts seem to be working.

Images courtesy of Flickr user D. Miller and Shutterstock / Gl0ck

“We’re not going to be a place for cat photos,” said Marc Bodnick, a product and business executive at Quora who explained the product in an interview Wednesday. “We’re not a site for light, viral, multimedia-sharing without text. We’re a site where people share ideas and thoughts. So the same type of people who write answers are going to be the same types of people who write on blogs.”

The move toward blogging represents a shift for Quora, which has so far been entirely about questions and answers that users could upvote and follow. But the site, which was launched by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo in 2010, has always been about providing high-quality information to a dedicated group of readers, and in this sense the addition of blogging makes sense. Not to mention that blogging could attract a larger audience to Quora than questions and answers that require a login, setting itself up for greater advertising opportunities than it would have otherwise.

D’Angelo sat down with GigaOM earlier this month where he explained where the company is headed:

“We think at a very high level there is a lot of knowledge that is inside people’s head and is not accessible. Sure, the internet (of today) is pretty vast and big, but it is still not where we can access that knowledge that easily. So you have a blog, but a lot of people don’t have an audience or aren’t as connected and able to find the information as you. Access to that knowledge is much harder, and our goal is to make it easy. Anything you want to know, you go to Quora and get it.”

Quora executives are pushing the idea that through the new blogging platform, anyone with a good idea and smart writing can become famous on the site, even if that person doesn’t have a strong Twitter following or an existing popular blog of their own.

“You can write an answer that goes viral on the site despite no one following you,” Bodnick said.

And to a certain extent, this is true — there are indviduals, like the guy who wrote about his car breaking down in front of Steve Job’s house, who have become “Quora famous,” to an extent. Bodnick noted that some of the service’s “top writers“ get 30,000 views on a post per month, and some of the very top writers get up to 100,000.

But Quora attracts a very specific readership in a few key areas, like movies, technology, or startups, and the people who have built a dedicated Quora following seem more poised for Quora blogging success than entirely new users who write about topics that are less popular. If you’re blogging about Steve Jobs and post your writing under the Steve Jobs topic, which has thousands of existing followers, you could do well. But it seems fairly topic-specific, and hardly a guarantee of publishing fame.

There are also so many blogging platforms out there, from WordPress to Tumblr to Medium to Branch to LinkedIn, it’s hard to think how Quora’s new tools presents much for the average blogger — they seem likely to excite people who are already consistent Quora posters. But for those users, the platform could allow them to expand on ideas that aren’t posed as answers to questions, and a new rich text editor for mobile released in a few weeks will add to that experience as well.

The Pew report notes that the number of Americans who regularly go online for news has remained almost exactly the same since it did a similar study in 2010: about 46 percent said that they get news online at least three days a week. But the number of people who said they regularly get news on a cellphone, tablet or other mobile device has ballooned from 9 percent to 15 percent– and the number who said that they regularly see news on social networks has gone from 7 percent to 20 percent.Pew notes that these two trends also go together, in the sense that users who have smartphones (about 48 percent of those surveyed) were far more likely to see news on social networking sites. And those who have iPads, Kindles and other tablets — who made up about 21 percent of those surveyed — are also much more likely to get their news from social networks.

According to the survey, more than 30 percent of the respondents between 18 and 39 years of age said they regularly saw news or news headlines on social networks, compared with about 20 percent two years ago. One interesting note in the report was the tiny proportion of users who said that they got news from Twitter, which is seen by many as a news-driven network — only 3 percent of general internet users said they got news from Twitter, and less than 30 percent of regular Twitter users said they got news there.

It wasn’t immediately clear from the study whether the users who were surveyed got all of their news by reading headlines from social networks or other sources, or whether they followed links from Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn to newspaper or other websites to get more information. Most publishers say those networks have become an increasingly powerful source of traffic, but some readers may get enough of the headlines or news items they need simply by reading posts on Twitter or Facebook — in the same way that earlier users may have gotten their fill of news from headlines on the radio or on television.

One thing is also obvious from the Pew report: namely, that newspaper readership continues its long, slow decline — and radio has also been following the same general pattern. The study says that the number of Americans who read a newspaper the day before the survey was taken fell to 23 percent, down only a few percentage points from 2010′s survey, but down by more than half from the number who said the same a decade earlier.And while TV news consumption has held up much better, it has been in decline over the past few years as well, and the Pew report notes that the future looks like more of the same given how few younger users say they use it for news: only 34 percent of those under 30 said they do this regularly, almost exactly the same proportion that said they got their news primarily from social networks.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly

“B.E. Technologies LLC” claims that Amazon’s Kindle devices violate its technology for serving ads “in a personalized manner.” It has filed similar lawsuits against Facebook and LinkedIn.

The patents in question date from 2000 and 2001 and describe the process of selecting interent ads based on what applications the viewer has been using on his or her computer. Here’s part of the abstract from US Patent 6,628,314 which B.E. Technologies claims Facebook is infringing:

A method and apparatus for providing an automatically upgradeable software application that includes targeted advertising based upon demographics and user interaction with the computer. The software application is a graphical user interface that includes a display region used for banner advertising that is downloaded from time to time over a network such as the Internet.  [..] when the user runs the program (such as a spreadsheet program), an advertisement will displayed that is relevant to the program (such as an advertisement for a stock brokerage).

The lawsuits raise the familiar question of whether the patent owner is an inventor who has been wronged by the giant companies or if this is just another instance of “patent trolling.” Under the trolling model, shell firms that don’t make anything acquire patents in order to demand money from companies that do. The prizes they collect then provide a war-chest to launch further lawsuits.

In this case, B.E. Technologies does not appear to conduct any other business besides litigation. Its patents also date from a period when the U.S. Patent Office issued a flood of notoriously flimsy patents. While many inventions appear obvious in hindsight, the idea described in BE Tcchnologies’ patent of serving internet ads based on user behavior may well have existed before the year 2000.

Facebook and Amazon are familiar with patent troll suits which can cost millions of dollars to defend. The troll suits, however, are also increasingly being aimed at start-up companies who have less cash to divert from developers to lawyers.

Here’s a copy of B.E. Technologies complaint against Facebook which requests damages and an order that the social network be barred from using the technology in question:

Banner Ad Troll

A complaint filed in San Jose cites a “troubling lack of security measures” and accuses LinkedIn of negligence and breach of contract for failing to encrypt its user database with industry standard security measures. The incident resulted in hackers posting users’ information online but it is not yet clear how much data they obtained.

The lead plaintiff in the case is Katie Szpryka who paid for an upgraded account with the social network. The lawsuit, which also covers a separate class of users with free accounts, adds that LinkedIn breached California consumer protection laws. It cites a FTC complaint from 2003 in which the federal regulator accused the Guess! clothing company of unfair trade practices for storing customer information in an unencrypted database with poor security.

The case is likely to turn on whether LinkedIn did enough to protect its users accounts and whether it did enough to notify users of the hacking incident. The breach was first reported by a Norwegian security firm and then publicized by numerous technology sites but LinkedIn appears to have dithered for more than twelve hours before telling users that data had been compromised.

Critics claim LinkedIn should have used a common practice known as “salting” to make the passwords harder to decrypt.

The LinkedIn case is just the latest in a parade of class actions in which technology companies stand accused of violating user privacy. As we reported yesterday in regard to the latest $10 million Facebook settlement, money from the lawsuits rarely goes to users.

The complaint is below. It was first reported by CourtHouse news service.

Linkedin Class Actionhttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/97589713/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-1yhcpot45wk857owp3z9

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Blazej Lyjak].