On June 27, LinkedIn introduced two new features onto your homepage -- ‘Who’s Viewed Your Updates’ and ‘You Recently Visited’. These features are intended to provide you with more personalized insights on your activities and engagement across LinkedIn.

"Our goal was to create a customized experience that would make it easier for you to begin each day armed with the knowledge and insights you need to be productive and successful," LinkedIn's Caroline Gaffney wrote in a blog post.

Who's Viewed Your Updates is pretty much self-explanatory; it gives you the ability to see who has looked at your updates within a 14 day period in addition to how well those updates were received (likes, shares, comments). The cool thing about this is that it goes beyond just your first-degree connections as you'll be able to see details from second- and third-degree networks.

The You Recently Visited feature is also pretty much explanatory; it'll show you profiles and articles you've viewed,  as well as what searches you've performed and what discussion you've participated in.

"This makes it easier to retrace your steps, re-engage in conversations or follow-up with that old colleague you intended to connect with," Gaffney wrote.

These new features that LinkedIn has rolled out is part of their process of revamping their homepage which has started since last year,  including streamlined navigation and the ability to add rich media among other updated features.

Related articles

• LinkedIn Adds New Features: This Week in Social Media (socialmediaexaminer.com)
• How LinkedIn's three newest features can work for you (pcworld.com)
• LinkedIn Gets A Little More Watchful, Now Tells You Who's Viewed Your Updates, And Where You've Been Looking (techcrunch.com)

Landing a managing position at a company can be a fulfilling job, but with it comes a lot of responsibilities that can make the job a difficult one. It's important to find  the right balance of friendliness and authority as a good manager attracts great employees who look to excel at their work, which leads to a boost in company profits.  So how do you strike the balance that'll allow you to be a good manager?

1. Do Your Job 
If you take nothing else from this article, this is the one point to keep in mind. Becoming a manager isn't an excuse to pawn your work onto the employees that you are managing while you take a passive role. Of course, sometimes your job may require that you delegate tasks to others as this is a more strategic way of getting things done, but your staff will respect you for doing what needs to be done and being willing to pitch in like everyone else when it's required for you to do so.

2. See The Positive 
Acknowledge the positives aspects of your employees and the work that they do. Don't be one of those managers who only focuses on the negatives and never on the positives. Positivity breeds positivity. People are motivated and will be willing to go the extra mile if they know they'll be receiving recognition for the work they do. On the other hand, being negative is demoralizing for staff and can cause lackluster performance or employees to defect to other companies.

3. Communication
Make sure that your employees know that if they have any questions or concerns, that you're there willing to listen a you're ready and willing as it's important to keep an open channel of communication allowing you to stay on top of any rising issues so that you can fix them easily and quickly.

• Don't be one of those bosses who accidentally makes a person feel like a bother just because they're bringing up an issue or because they have a question. You should view these chances asan opportunity to show your employee how much you want this organization to be a fulfilling place to work.
• Never minimize or dismiss the concerns of your employees, and always make sure that you've answered their questions completely.
  
  

4. Learn From Mistakes
As the head honcho, part of your job including taking responsibility for other people's actions, so of course the last thing you want is to be responsible for other people's mistakes. However, it's important that people realize that it's okay to make a mistake, as long as they learn from it. If people are too afraid of making mistakes, they'll end up checking with you on every little detail, making them more dependent on you, draining your time, and less effective in the work place.

Since the NSA debacle, people are looking to use alternative search engines that protect users' privacy. Duck Duck Go is one search engine that has seen a huge spike in traffic, hitting a milestone of more than 3 million searches in a single day, after the NSA surveillance revelations. 

As the company’s traffic page shows, the milestone occurred on Monday when Duck Duck Go had 3,095,907 “direct searches,” meaning searches done by human visitors (this search number excludes the millions of searches or hits by bots).

What makes this so amazing is the impact that the NSA news has made for Duck Duck Go and how that's translated to the three million searches. It took them close to 4 years to get to 1 million searches (1445 days to be exact), 483 days to get to 2 million searches, and only 8 days to get to 3 million searches. 

It appears that privacy concerns from the NSA/PRISM issue are spurring some people to seek alternative ways to perform their searches. DuckDuckGo is taking advantages by getting themselves mentioned via various media outlets and sending out press releases. It'll be interesting to see if they can continue to capitalize on these people who are defecting and actually take a significant chunk away from the big three (Google, Bing, Yahoo).