• TechCrunch, Friday, July 31, 2009 10:17 AM

The Wall Street Journal is gunning for the LinkedIn crowd and all its monetization opportunities -- jobs, ads, and, a marketing pool for WSJ subscriptions -- with a new social network called WSJ Connect, according to TechCrunch. Apparently, they're even calling it "LinkedIn Killer" internally.

Instead of building it internally, like they did with its existing WSJ Community, they've tapped another arm of parent company News Corp. -- Slingshot Lab. WSJ Connect is still in the planning/conceptual stages, says one source, but there is "strong interest" to move the project forward.

Importantly, it would leverage the WSJ brand but would be a separate property and unencumbered by the need for a paid subscription to the newspaper. Conceptual screenshots of the product are apparently floating around Slingshot, the WSJ and MySpace.

Read the whole story at TechCrunch »