So I was curious to hear from LinkedIn: What is the point of endorsing someone on the social network? Is there any benefit to me if I get endorsement from a kind-of-random person who doesn’t know me in the endorsed capacity? Will it make my experience on the site any better, or should I remove endorsements from off-target people?

The answer from LinkedIn was: An off-target endorsement isn’t a huge deal, as long as you have the skill for which the person endorsed you. But as the barrier to leaving feedback gets even lower, which is the point of endorsements, LinkedIn needs to find a way to make sense of all that data that’s being added to the site. Or it risks being seen as annoying its users with unwanted notifications.

I spoke with Brad Mauney, who is a product manager for identity features, about the idea behind endorsements and where the product is headed. He first suggested that other people might be getting more relevant endorsements than me, or that if I accepted too many people I don’t know, that could affect the feedback I’m getting.

But it’s not just me. A quick survey of friends and co-workers raised the same questions and concerns. Mothers-in-law, in particular, seemed to be avid endorsers, from my very limited survey. There’s a Quora thread devoted to the issue of endorsement accuracy, as well as questions from users on LinkedIn itself about how useful the feature really is.

LinkedIn launched the endorsements product in September 2012, and in May 2013, the company announced that there have been 1 billion endorsements since then. The company already had the recommendations product, which worked more like a formal resume reference, and Mauney said they’ve seen both endorsements and recommendations increase since then.

Part of what makes endorsements so prolific — and sometimes off-target — is that it’s incredible easy to endorse someone. Now when you visit a connection’s page, it makes auto-suggestions for you at the very top. But the ease of leaving feedback plays into the complaints, with some people arguing that it makes them less meaningful.

“We wanted to create something that was much more lively and a lot more streamlined,” Mauney said. “We wanted a way for a user to endorse another user. To sort of tip their hat and say, ‘I endorse you for this particular skill.’”

From LinkedIn’s perspective, the more endorsements people leave for you, the more it can build up information about your true skills, even if not all of those people have worked closely with you. LinkedIn analyzes your profile to pick the skills it thinks you might have, and then auto-suggests that people endorse you for those. Which probably explains why most of the people endorsing me are random, but the skills that end up on my profile are not. And once skills are established on my profile through endorsements, it adds to the data that comes up along with my name in a search.

“It’s a wisdom of the crowds sort of thing. A single endorsement taken in isolation, that might not mean very much,” he said. “But when I look at your profile and I see you’ve been endorsed for a single thing 99 times, that’s actually quite meaningful.”

But when Mauney and I talked about the accuracy of endorsements overall, he did say that the company is looking for ways to make them more useful. For instance, he said, if Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, endorsed him for his product management, that should be weighted much more heavily than if his mom endorsed him for product management (assuming she has not also co-founded a tech company).

In fact, if he had no endorsements for product management at all except for Hoffman’s, that might be just as meaningful as 50 vague friends or acquaintances endorsing him for the same thing. Not all endorsements are equal, and he said it’s fair to say that they’re looking for ways to improve this.

So until then, yes, you might keep getting endorsed by that person you met at a conference one time and probably wouldn’t recognize on the street, or your mother-in-law. Just remember, you can always hide their endorsement. Or you know, disconnect if you really don’t know them in a professional capacity.

Have you endorsed someone on LinkedIn before? Do you find the notifications annoying? Leave a comment and tell us why.

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We’re going to have people discussing all this and more on Wednesday and Thursday at this week’s Structure conference in San Francisco. In the sixth year of the event we’re spending a lot of our time delving into the practical matters of building out webscale infrastructure, from the networking conundrums to the business process around scaling.

If there’s one big theme for the show this year, it’s what happens when IT meets the business and how to bring an understanding of business goals to scaling out services, whether you are Amazon or Revlon. We’ll have Kevin Scott of LinkedIn sharing how he re-architected the business social network’s infrastructure to better meet business goals. Cory von Wallenstein of Dyn will discuss the process the company follows to support existing features while building new ones that must scale rapidly without breaking the service or the bank.

We’ll also have executives from Warner Music Group sharing how the company is building out an internal platform as a service and what it will do for the business, while CIOs from Revlon, Kohl’s and The Clorox Company share their takes on the cloud from inside the enterprise.

Networking nerds from web giants will be there discussing the importance of using software defined networks and real-time information for building application aware networks. Plus, we have several talks from people such as Jeff Dean of Google, Jason Hoffman of Joyent and Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix  that will discuss how to push our infrastructure’s boundaries for the data-rich era we’re entering.

We’ll also have ten three-minute talks from our Cloud Trailblazers who will be there ready to talk about their ideas for how to rethink infrastructure. You can meet the stars of tomorrow over the course of the two-day event. Or you can network with the stars of today. Plus, two hot startups will debut and there’s also a six-company LaunchPad with very young startups.

I’m preparing to get on a plane from Austin to spend this week in San Francisco. I’ve made this trip dozens of times for dozens of GigaOM events, but this one has me the most excited. We’ve pulled some amazing people together to talk not just about defining the cloud or various trends in infrastructure, but how the shift in information technology is playing out at real companies whether they are startups, enterprises or the giants of the webscale world.

We have a few tickets left, so just sign up and get on over to the event. This isn’t some wannabe cloud show. This is Structure, the first and the best cloud show planned by myself, Derrick Harris, Barb Darrow and the GigaOM events team. We wouldn’t let you down.

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We’ve already seen apps like Feedly, Pulse, and NewsBlur gain a whole bunch of new followers as a result of the news, but there’s still one more app we’ll be waiting to try before picking what RSS camp to join in July: Digg’s news reader, scheduled to launch in late June. Digg executives haven’t said a lot about the product, but they shared a few details with me in a recent interview.

While Digg went into a steep decline in recent years that was evident as early as 2009, the NYC-based incubator Betaworks has brought the site back to life in recent months since acquiring the site last July. Digg announced just after the Google Reader announcement that it too would be launching a competitive service, and considering the team’s success in taking the previously defunct social news site and making it relevant again, there’s a good chance that its RSS reader could be a win as well.

I recently sat down in the large, airy Betaworks office in the heart of the Meatpacking District in New York, where the walls are covered in paper lists and small groups were holding brainstorm sessions all over the high-ceilinged space. Programmers and designers sat around the three rooms at different tables, which were organized by company, from Digg to Dots to Instapaper (some of which were just a few people.) When I visited, CEO John Borthwick was busy explaining what Betaworks is all about to a group of visitors through the Open.Co visitor program, and there was Chinese food on the counter from a group lunch. It felt like a more energetic, collaborative version of any co-working space I’ve visited in San Francisco.

I sat down with Jake Levine, formerly of News.me and now the general manager for Digg, and Andrew McLaughlin, the SVP of Betaworks and CEO of Digg, who was formerly a VP at Tumblr, Deputy CTO of the United States, and Director of Global Public Policy for Google. Levine and McLaughlin talked about the evolution of their thinking toward social news, and how the new Digg RSS reader project was a long-planned feature that is essential to Digg’s goal of creating the best social news experience on the web.

The re-birth of Digg

Digg has been around for a while — younger users, like myself, might not remember it from its heyday, when it practically introduced the idea of social news.

Founder Kevin Rose (now a partner at Google Ventures), was the subject of a now-infamous cover of Businessweek in the summer of 2006. Though the company later spiraled downward, caught between the rise of Facebook and Twitter, as Om wrote, it had a lasting impact on modern media.

Parts of the company were sold off to different companies like The Washington Post and LinkedIn, but it was Betaworks that bought the consumer-facing site and reader base for reportedly just under $500,000 dollars in July 2012.

“If there’s any company that understands the real-time nature of the web, it’ll be the people that brought us all these really cool things like bit.ly and Chartbeat,” Rose said when he reflected on the sale.

Re-imagining Digg from lessons learned with News.Me

Betaworks advises and invests in companies that are associated with the concept of social news. Some of its brainchildren, acquisitions and investments include Bit.ly, Chartbeat, Instapaper, SocialFlow, Dots, and Tumblr, just to name a few. CEO John Borthwick, who most recently spoke at our paidContent Live conference in April, has talked about the group’s unique approach to fostering startups, which is to launch them quickly in their early form, then killing the ones that don’t catch hold and putting people, servers and data insights behind the ones that do.

So when Betaworks acquired Digg, the timing couldn’t have been better. The group was getting ready to shutter News.Me in October 2012, in part because of Twitter’s API restrictions that were becoming a burden. But the app, which provided users with the top five tweeted articles among the people they follow on Twitter, had already given Betaworks useful data from news geeks and early adopters that could help the group create consumer-facing news site for a wider audience.

Levine explained that News.Me was an excellent product for the Twitter power users, and while it didn’t ultimately scale into a project that worked for everyone, the data, when combined with the stats from Chartbeat (measuring real-time publishing analytics) and Bit.ly (measuring analytics for links shared across the web), provided some interesting insights.

“We realized that the vast majority of people don’t have access to that kind of news,” Levine said. “But we had the parallel realization that we’d accumulated Twitter data from the 100,000 or so early adopting power users: what they were sharing, and what was shared in their networks. We realized could build an awesome network based on those people who were on Twitter for the people who weren’t.”

So the team quickly put together the new Digg in a matter of a few weeks, stripping down the design to a basic grid of stories that are selected both by algorithms and human editors, and letting users perform a few basic functions like sharing and saving. It was a quick start to putting Digg back on track, but the team’s plans didn’t end there.

How RSS fits into the ultimate plan

While adding an RSS reader might seem like an odd choice for the group re-inventing social news — after all, there wasn’t much in terms of social features on the old Google Reader (Google killed the one social feature the thing had) — McLaughlin and Levine explained that in reality, adding an RSS feed was always part of the plan for Digg. Google’s announcement just accelerated it.

“It was on the roadmap and we knew we wanted to eventually have a more comprehensive way to consume,” McLaughlin said. “We just jacked it up to do that now.”

While the two couldn’t yet reveal what Digg’s reader will look like exactly, and said it’s still in the works, slated for a June launch, they described it as two different parts to one Digg site: one part being the current homepage of socially-driven stories generated by algorithms and editors, and the other being an RSS reader of a user’s feeds, with updated features that someone following blogs in 2013 would want (save to Instapaper options, etc.) The two sections will be unified by a common design.

“For now, it’s aimed at power users and we’ll see if we can nail that. It’s going to be super clean and very uncluttered. Very fast,” McLaughlin said.

Users who don’t want the RSS feature and don’t create logins will still be able to visit Digg.com, so that experience won’t change for people who are happy with it. But ideally, people who care about following particular blogs and news sources will be able to get that kind of news from Digg as well.

“What we’re working on in the Digg reader, and what we think is now the integral part of a good reader, is speedy management,” McLaughlin said. “We’re trying to make it very easy to sort and just distill all of your items, or any feed down to the most popular items or the most popular in your social circles.”

Reading a business?

They said they’re extremely optimistic that a quality news reader could actually make money and create a sustainable business. While Digg’s  reader likely won’t be a paid product at first, they said they could see subscriptions or download fees as a way to make money in the future when the product is more solidified. As of early April, about 40 percent of survey respondants said that they’d be willing to pay for the product — a remarkable number, even if only half of them are telling the truth.

“Our goal is not to make everyone a power user. There are users who want that highly personalized reader experience. But the next year for us is exploring all of the options in that space,” Levine said. “There are plenty of products for power users. Our mission of making the social web more accessible for news discovery is something that transcends just this product.”

For those of us who obsessively check Twitter every day to find and re-tweet the latest news, it might be hard to understand the problem that Digg is trying to solve. But while we may think we have social news figured out, it’s time for a reality check: as of December 2012, only 16 percent of online adults were using Twitter, and far fewer are actually tweeting. If Digg succeeds, it could both attract the power users who care about RSS feeds and power the types of products like Google Reader, and then take that news data derived from those users to create a smarter general news site for everyone else.

Pre-Twitter Digg, say hello to post-Twitter Digg.

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Splinter.me will certainly be hoping so. Currently in beta, the Egyptian-Romanian-Belgian startup (welcome to the EMEA region) is trying its own data-centric spin on the subject. Splinter.me essentially wants to replace the resume with information automatically pulled in from the job-seeker’s social networks and any other platforms where information about them may reside.

So far, so Silp, but Splinter.me wants to then mix up this functionality with not only automated job matchmaking, but also career advice. “We can tell a recruiter, ‘This candidate might fit your job,’ but can also give career advice to the user. We can tell them, ‘Others score higher because they have this skill that you’re missing,’” co-founder Adelina Peltea told me.

Splinter.me will only launch in full this coming September, but it added a raft of new features this week. One particularly handy feature called Common Connections does what it says on the tin: it tells two “splinters” (users) which connections they have in common. What’s interesting here is that it can find those common connections across third-party platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn, even if those people are not themselves, er, splinters (I can’t quite shake the memories of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles whenever I hear that term).

What’s more, the company has also added a feature called Splinter Lookup that allows for natural language searching. Echoing Facebook Graph Search to a degree, this function allows users to search for, by way of example, “splinters who use PHP, live in Boston and know Bob Jones”.

Another new feature, Hubs, provides a repository of information to help job-seekers brush up particular skills, such as web development and gamification.

It is very early days for this company – it has just 1,200 beta users and so far it only has angel backing. But on the other hand, it does have certain things in its favor beyond the aforementioned features, in particular its (intended) lack of tech-industry exclusivity and the fact that it’s pushing hard in markets such as North Africa and Europe.

Many of Splinter.me’s key rivals in this space, such as Path.to, are highly U.S.-focused and deal mostly if not entirely with programmers and the like. Which is fine – the U.S. tech scene is a big market – but it does leave other markets to conquer. After that September launch, let’s see if Splinter.me can fill some of those gaps.

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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.

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LinkedIn posted its first quarter earnings on Thursday, reporting revenue of $324.7 million, which beat analyst expectations of $317.08 million. The company saw first-quarter earnings of $0.45 per share excluding one-time charges, compared to analyst expectations of $0.31 per share. The first quarter revenue of $324.7 million is up 72 percent over the $188.5 million in revenue from the same quarter of 2012.

As we’ve written before, the company’s corporate recruiting efforts, called the “Talent Solutions” portion of the business, has become the primary money-maker for LinkedIn, and that remained true for this quarter. The Talent Solutions section grew to become 57 percent of the company’s revenue this quarter with $184.3 million in revenue, up from 53 percent of the company’s revenue last quarter. It allows companies and professional recruiters to pay for access to the product that lets them track candidates, post job openings, and manage submissions.

The company reported $22.6 million in net income and non-GAAP net income of $52.4 million, which translated to earnings per share excluding one-time charges of $0.45.

The company noted earlier this year that a good deal of its new user acquisitions were coming from overseas, and in fact nearly 40 percent of the company’s revenue this quarter came from international markets. The company also noted Thursday that they’ve seen huge growth from students on LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn’s SVP of engineering, Kevin Scott, will be talking about the challenges in leading engineering for the growing business this summer at our Structure conference in San Francisco.

LinkedIn has emerged as one of the most profitable social web companies on the public market right now, consistently posting strong numbers and coming off particularly strong fourth quarter earnings. Since February, the company has launched a variety of products and new features, having recently re-designed its consumer-facing mobile app as well as its Recruiter page for corporate recruiters. The company also launched the brand-new LinkedIn Contacts product, which is a separate mobile app that serves as an integrated contacts app for super-networkers. LinkedIn also acquired the social news reader Pulse, and is clearly looking to make the main feed on the site more of a hub for business-related news and media.

CEO Jeff Weiner also noted that LinkedIn will be selling sponsored content in the main LinkedIn feed, which fits with the company’s goal to populate the feed with more business-related news, photos and videos. Once LinkedIn becomes a destination for people to find current news, it gives the company more chances to sell ads. But even as the number of users on LinkedIn appears to be growing, it’s all relative: LinkedIn is only at 225 million registered users, up from 200 million in January, and those are just registered, not active. So take that for whatever it’s worth.

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The LinkedIn Contacts app, which will launch just on iOS for U.S. users on an invite-only basis at first, allows you to pull together your Google, Outlook, Yahoo, and phone contacts into one contact database hosted on the app. (It also supports integration with some apps like Tripit or Cardmunch.) Contacts then lets you sort and filter people based on how often you contact them and lets you add details about your relationship to serve as personal reminders.

For instance, I can mark when and where I first met one of my LinkedIn conections, see when I last emailed that person in Gmail, call them on the phone (if they list their number), and see when I last met with them according to my Outlook calendar (if I used one of those).

These seem like useful features that could help you sort and categorize professional contacts, and it’s cool to see how LinkedIn has used algorithims and data to put together individual relationship histories for each contact without much work required from the user. However, it’s unclear why LinkedIn felt that these features should exist in a standalone app.

Will people really download a second LinkedIn app if they already have one that works just fine? These features seem like they’d be more useful if they were integrated into the existing app rather than launched in a second one. The company did indicate that it will evaluate how the product does on mobile in deciding whether to add features into the existing app, and users who gain access to the new Contacts app will have this data integrated into their contacts section of LinkedIn.com, which is smart.

Sachin Rekhi, the former CEO of the address book company Connected, which LinkedIn acquired in 2011, is now heading up the Contacts app, and he explained that LinkedIn wanted to keep the contact info in a separate app to better target the specific audience that would find it useful. Namely, professionals who want networking info on mobile. But it’s unclear which of LinkedIn’s existing members wouldn’t fit that description.

“We’re taking a multi-app strategy across different use cases and target audiences,” Rekhi said.

The other major downside to the app is that it doesn’t integrate with Facebook or Twitter, so it’s fairly limited in the types of information it can actually import. The company would not indicate whether this was because Facebook and Twitter refused to provide access to those social graphs, or whether LinkedIn wasn’t interested in adding them. Rekhi said it’s because the Contacts app just focuses on professional contacts rather than more social features, so starting with apps like Gmail and Outlook made sense.

However, the increasing reality is that a lot of people do make professional contacts over Facebook and Twitter, and as Facebook improves its messaging and contacts products, it seems like a major downside that the LinkedIn app wouldn’t include those. Presumably, LinkedIn wants you connect with people over its own social network, wishing them happy birthday, calling them, and catching up with them on the Contacts app rather than through Facebook. But by not including Facebook’s social graph, it makes the app a lot less complete for younger users like myself.

So what’s the benefit for LinkedIn in producing this app? Of course, more eyeballs focused on LinkedIn and more screentime with the company’s products are always good for the company, and messaging and calling apps have become popular recently as companies try to hook users into communicating through their services. Importing all of your contacts and email information gives LinkedIn much more data to use as it turns your information into value for professional recruiters, who drive most of the company’s revenue.

Plus, as LinkedIn focuses its site on producing more news and media content, as evidenced by the Pulse acquisition, it’s possible it wants to make the main LinkedIn app more of a news reader and the Contacts app where you communicate with other individuals. But the company has a long way to go before it builds the equivalent of Facebook and Facebook Messenger.

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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.

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Enlighted says its customers include Google, LinkedIn, Bank of New York, Turner Broadcasting and the City of San Jose. New investors RockPort Capital and DFJ JAIC joined the round, along with existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Intel Capital.

The startup’s lighting control tech can individually measure and manage lighting at each light fixture and can cut energy consumption from lighting in office and commercial buildings by 50 to 75 percent. The sensors can detect light level, occupancy, temperature and power consumption in the 100 square feet under each light. The company says it’s saved some 15 gigawatts of electricity since it began installations two years ago.

Enlighted’s first customer was green carpet company Interface Global, which used the lighting management system on its 35,000 square foot facility located in Acworth, Ga. Interface says it was able to cut its lighting power by 70 percent, and achieved a return on investment in 18 months.

Big data analytics and sensor tech — IT — is appearing as one of the bright spots in cleantech startups these days. Some investors call this the so-called Clean Web, or using digital tech to manage resources from energy to water to food. Check out our 20-page premium research report on Building Energy Management Systems: Overview and Forecast, on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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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 GigaOM .

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