Last month I wrote about an assessment of LinkedIn that Josh Sternberg had posted on Digiday. Sternberg argued that LinkedIn was "a sleeping giant of publishing", well-suited to compete on five dimensions relevant to business-to-business publishing.
I don't know if LinkedIn was following Sternberg's post, but last Friday the platform announced that it had agreed to buy Pulse, a service that "aggregates news from different industries and presents it to viewers in a tilelike, graphical interface." Pulse also provides corporate clients like the Wall Street Journal with a white-label content dissemination solution.
For the most part, any given acquisition is a data point, not a trend. That said, access to services like Pulse makes LinkedIn more likely to provide significant competition in the B2B space.
It's worth noting that the transaction took place the same week that ABM and SIIA announced plans to merge the two associations. Competition from the likes of LinkedIn can only increase the extent to which traditional business publishers need ready access to a broader set of tools.
