In his recent RecruitingBlogs post, "Agency Recruiters Censored!," Nick Lagos wrote a sentiment which seemed widely shared by this community, which is to say, LinkedIn's move from professional network to publishing portal has essentially stifled even the superficial social networks of what's more or less become a candidate database.  

As Lagos wrote, "LinkedIn has effectively stifled the voice of Recruiters (or any Independent) who have invested in the LinkedIn platform and for years have built their Networks (their customers) through careful crafting and maintenance, often using the In-Profile Activity Feed to establish Current Relevance with their Target Audiences."

This morning, however, the Mountain View based company might have finally taken notice to the not so silent grumblings about their shift towards owned, not shared, content - and a big step into democratizing its members' voices, agency recruiters or otherwise.

According to a statement released by the company:

"This morning LinkedIn opened its publishing platform to its members, allowing them to share their expertise and build their professional brand by posting original long-form content. When a member publishes a post on LinkedIn, this original content becomes part of their professional profile, is shared with their network and has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled. Now members also have the ability to follow other members that are not in their network and build their own group of followers."

What does this mean for recruiters?  According to LinkedIn, this means that "by enabling members to further showcase their professional brands via their own long-form content, recruiters gain more insights they can use to better hone in on the right person for the job."

On the official LinkedIn Corporate Blog, the title of the "official" announcement hinted at LinkedIn's ultimate goal: to become "the ultimate professional publishing platform."  In other words, this move signals a further move by LinkedIn to try to not only own your professional information, but your content as well, encouraging and rewarding members for providing this multi-billion dollar publicly traded company with free original content (and, subsequently, the traffic needed to boost ad rates and stock prices). 

The question is: will you use it?  Is it worth it?  Let us know by leaving a comment below.