[vbrendel]

She's clearly serious about this. From her blog:

* 6. LinkedIn. Please do NOT shop through LinkedIn for all the important sounding senior practitioners in town, and ask them to connect. It comes across as bush league, it shows poor judgment, and you are ignoring the fundamental rule of connections – reciprocity. Networking is conducted between individuals who have met or worked with each other, and who can provide equal levels of help to each other. If I would be only the 5th connection you have on LinkedIn, and I’m bringing 800+ connections to the table, what you would get is the ability to harvest my contacts for job leads, and I get – absolutely nothing of use or interest out of accepting your invite.

These types of wishful connection requests come across as self-serving and tacky. Of course, if you’ve been an intern for someone, please ask them to connect. Every professional I know bends over backwards to help their interns, give them recommendations, etc. However, if the only way you met a business leader was because they came to class to speak, please hold off on the presumptuous urge to ask them to connect with you. Right now, your LinkedIn connections should be classmates, professors and the people you worked for at internships or part-time jobs.

[mjolk]

It's just linkedin, don't take it so seriously. It's just a website.

[duskwuff]

I feel like there's something to this, but they're still missing the point a bit. The concept of LinkedIn connections is fundamentally supposed to be that they represent that these people know each other. It shouldn't be motivated by reciprocal "help", but it certainly shouldn't be indiscriminate either!