Sarah Palin has opened an account on LinkedIn, the professional networking site that launched in 2003 and has since become a sleeping giant in a space dominated by its flashier counterpart, Facebook. What is she doing there? Presumably the same thing that most of the site's other 50 million registered users are -- looking for new gigs or staying in touch with former colleagues.

But how many of those 50 million users are former governors and vice presidential candidates? Palin's online resume doesn't tell us anything we don't know: She has shockingly limited experience for a former veep candidate. But there's something about the way her resume appears on the site that reinforces just how limited her background really is. Her longest stretch in any given job was six years, as mayor of Wasilla. Prior to that, she served on that city's council for three years. Since 2006, her longest gig was two years and seven months, when she was governor.

Call me cynical, but my view of networking events -- whether virtual or non -- is that they're only attended by people who are looking for work. This makes them inherently useless from a practical standpoint. If everyone's looking for work, how is anyone really helping anyone else?

Sarah Palin doesn't need any more publicity or to vie for jobs like the rest of us. She can easily ride the wave she landed on face-first last fall and make a mint just by being the CEO of Sarah Palin, Inc. So I wonder, is this latest move just a ploy to get people like me to write blog posts about it? I suspect that it is.

[Image: Sarah Palin's LinkedIn profile photo]