First of all, a sincere congratulations to Italian IT consultant Carmelo Cutuli, who has now made the top 30 most connected people on LinkedIn. And I’m all for creative use of press releases, but is this really newsworthy? Online Business Networks: LinkedIn rankings are now newsworthy?

Funny, I just declined Carmelo’s request to connect today — for the second time. What Carmelo is doing is the social networking equivalent of spam. Why should I connect with him? Just because he knows a bunch of people? Too bad there isn’t a way to give people a "thumbs down" in LinkedIn.