Get ‘LinkedIn Answers’ notifications about your area of expertise

If you use LinkedIn, you might also know about their Answers functionality. It’s a place where you can post your own questions, or to help answer questions from other people. I also use LinkedIn and I like to help people with their questions but for me, the way LinkedIn helps me helping others isn’t really helpful.

In Answers, you can add certain categories in which your an ‘expert’ (or claim to be one) but these are very general categories. For me, LinkedIn suggest the categories Blogging, Web Development , Computers and Software , Internet Marketing and Viral Marketing. That’s going in the right direction for sure, but there are many many questions asked in those categories that I can’t answer. And even if I could, I wouldn’t have the time to do so. Another big problem here is that I have to go to the LinkedIn website to find out if there are any questions asked which I might want to answer instead of getting a notification when an answer is being posted that I might be able to answer.

So the problems are:

1. I’m not served with answers specific to my area of expertise
2. I need to go find the answers instead of the answers finding me.

Find yourself having the same problem?

Create Yahoo Pipes RSS feed

I used Yahoo Pipes to create a custom RSS feeds. I collect feeds from all 22 main LinkedIn Answers categories. I then use a filter to only allow RSS items containing a certain keyword to pass through. The result is an RSS feed containing only those questions that contain the keyword of my interest. To read the RSS feed, ideally you would need to use a RSS reader (like Google Reader).

Try for yourself!

The great thing about Yahoo Pipes is that you can publish your pipes so I can share mine with you!

1. Go to my ‘LinkedIn Answers Filter’ page
2. Enter the keyword you want to filter on
3. Click the Run Pipe button.

That’s all! You are now served with the results, you can subscribe to it’s RSS feed and (of you have a Yahoo account) can copy the pipe to create your own version.

Things I’d like to add later:

• ability to enter more keywords
• ability to also block keywords

If you have other suggestions or improvements for the pipe, let me know in the comments!

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