Although the earlier exercises in this chapter were interesting, sooner rather than later, you’ll want to begin using the LinkedIn APIs to mine the full richness of the data that’s available to you. As you’d expect, there’s a basic developer opt-in process where you register to get authorization credentials; you’ll want to visit http://developer.linkedin.com and read up on the full details, but Figure 6-5 demonstrates the broad strokes. Once you have credentials, the overall process is similar to that of any other social network that requires you to do the OAuth dance to access APIs: you request API credentials, get back a token and secret, and then use these values to ultimately get the coveted access token that can be used when sending requests. Of course, most of the gory details will be abstracted away since we’ll be using the linkedin Python module to do most of the tedious work for us. Just easy_install python-linkedin.