My LinkedIn Avatar

I saw this tweet from Charlie O'Donnell yesterday:

LinkedIn pulled avatars of @laughingsquid @fredwilson @hunterwalk and me down. Isn't our "professionalism" for our networks to judge?

It's true. Here's my LinkedIn profile this morning:

My avatar is gone, taken down.

That's unfortunate. I'm with Charlie on this one. I think we should be able to determine what we want to use to represent ourselves professionally within reason (no porn, no emotionally disturbing images, etc).

In my case, the "AVC avatar" has become my online brand and I use it everywhere other than the usv.com website where we've opted to go with a consistent presentation across all of the professionals in our firm.

The good news is that Linked In seems to be aware of the issue. I got this tweet last night from their community person.

@fredwilson I hear you. lmk talk to our CS teams abt the profile pic issue. feel free to DM me if you've q's…

So hopefully they'll change their minds and let those of us who choose to use our online brands on Linked In have them back on our profiles. Stay tuned.