Bit.ly Builds Business on Libya Domain
The URL shortening service Bit.ly just secured $2 million in financing from investors including O'Reilly's AlphaTech Ventures. Though URL shorteners have been around for years, Bit.ly believes there's money in offering Twitter-friendly short links along with web analytics to track how the links are used. The company reports that its links were clicked 20 million times last month.
So far, the news coverage I've read about Bit.ly has neglected an unusual aspect of the startup: It's one of the only prominent online ventures using a domain name in the .LY namespace, which is controlled by Libya.
There are two issues that arise from this relationship.
First, of course, is the appearance of an American company doing business with Libya, a country that the U.S. considered a state sponsor of terror from 1979 through 2006. On Dec. 21, 1988, Libyan intelligence agents planted a bomb on Pan Am Flight 103 that blew up 31,000 feet over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people onboard.
Bit.ly's only doing a trivial amount of business with Libya -- the domains sell for $75 per year from the registrar Libyan Spider Network -- but its use of .LY domain is helping to popularize and legitimize the top-level domain for general use on the Internet. It's only a matter of time before a reporter decides to ask the families of Lockerbie victims what they think of the arrangement. I can't imagine that story going well for the company.
Even without that PR hit, there's another potential concern for Bit.ly and any other venture that builds its business on an .LY domain. These domains are governed by Libyan law, as it states on the Libyan Spider Network site:
Any .LY domain names may be registered, except domains containing obscene and indecent names/phrases, including words of a sexual nature; furthermore domain names may not contain words/phrases or abbreviations insulting religion or politics, or be related to gambling and lottery industry or be contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality.
So the names must conform to Islamic morality, and it's possible that the use of the domains could fall under the same rules. What are the odds that some of those 20 million clicks on a Bit.ly-shortened URL end up at sites that would be considered blasphemous or otherwise offensive in an Islamic nation? Bit.ly conveniently provides search pages for such topics as Islam, sharia, gambling and sex, any of which contain links that could spark another controversy.
Bit.ly's building a business atop a domain that could be taken away at any time, and the company's only recourse would be to seek redress in the Libyan court system. Take a look at Section 11 of the regulations for .LY owners:
The Arabic language is the language of interpretation, correspondence and the construction of the Regulation or anything related to it. ... In case of conflict between the Arabic and the English versions the Arabic version shall prevail.
I hope Bit.ly's attorneys are brushing up on their Arabic.
LemonYellow's Heather Anne Halpert is Back
Warning: In order to find this blog entry exciting, you must have been on the web for at least 81 Internet years (nine in human reckoning).
A decade ago this July, the New York Times published a profile of Heather Anne Halpert, a charmingly offbeat writer sharing her stray thoughts and experiences on a blog. But nobody called them blogs back then, so reporter Katie Hafner had trouble explaining Halpert's site, which she described as an "intellectual layer cake." (If that name had caught on, we'd all be called cakers.) From Hafner's piece:
Once in a great while a Web site appears, seemingly out of nowhere, and casts a spell. Such is the case with Lemonyellow.com, an on-line intellectual diary that makes the reader want to dig deeper and deeper.
Ms. Halpert began the site, at www.lemonyellow.com, last April as a repository "for all of the ideas and ephemera that would otherwise pop off the top of my head and float away," she said.
Every evening, she writes down whatever may have crossed her mind or happened in the course of her day: a book she once read, like The Names of Things, by Susan Brind Morrow, or wants to reread, like Feminism and Deconstructio non, by Diane Elam; the surrealist poet and artist Georges Hugnet; her encounter with a scrap metal dealer, a design project she is working on. Whatever she writes that seems to lend itself to a hyperlink gets one.
Halpert's cake disappeared in April 2001 -- the domain's now a graphic design company in Miami -- but you can find some slices on the Internet Archive and an amusing piece quoted by the early blog Alamut:
It makes me howl when people assume this is me -- laid bare. I once had someone tell me, to prove a point, that she'd gone back through the archives and mapped my writing to specific personal events. It was hard not to laugh... Naturally. This is the extent of me. Exposed. You can turn me over and prod my soft spots, stick your fingers into my orifices and smell me. Each bit of what you think is my soul corresponds to a point on or in my body defined by three coordinates. Click here to browse them.
For years, I've wondered what became of Halpert, who renounced blogging so thoroughly she never turned up in Google searches. So I was pleasantly surprised today to discover that she's back, sharing her thoughts in a medium even more lightweight than blogs, Twitter, as BlurryYellow.
Roasted a big fat expensive homeschooled cloth diapered pastured market chicken only to realize I forgot to salt the privileged beast. Bleh. 1:35 PM Mar 24th from web
Today's babysitting blind date went well. Could a fiend in human form disguise herself as a sweet girl with a daffy duck notebook? Maybe. 4:45 PM Feb 19th from web
Interviewing a new babysitter in a few minutes. Sigh. Like a blind date, but in Spanish (her) and potato shaped house shoes (me). 1:35 PM Feb 18th from web
Google thinks I have ringworm. 3:34 PM Feb 16th from web
ScottsMoneyBlog.Com's Get-Rich-Click Scheme
The 11-day-old web site ScottsMoneyBlog.Com is selling an amazing money-making work-at-home business opportunity for only $1.98. "Would you like to make $5,000 a month posting a link on Google?" asks Scott Hunter in an ad I spotted today on the Drudge Report. "Get paid $5 to $30 for every website link that you post on Google. No one needs to buy anything from you or Google in order to get paid."
I'm not clear on what Scott means by posting links "on Google," but he's wearing a tuxedo, so he must be rolling in dough.
I was about to invest some money I was saving for Nigerian ex-government officials with cash-flow problems, but I noticed something weird about Scott's site. He says he's originally from Saint Augustine, Florida:
My name is Scott Hunter. I am originally from the Saint Augustine, FL area. Recently married. I lost my job as a boring account rep for a manufacturing company a few months back. But here is my story on how I make $5,000+ a month by just submitting small text and ads online on Google. Read my story to learn how I did it and how you can do the same.
He's my neighbor! But when you visit his site from other places, his hometown changes. Scott's using a script from MaxMind that repeats the name of the town you're currently in:
My name is Scott Hunter. I am originally from the <script·src="http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js"></script><script type="text/javascript"></script>, <script·type="text/javascript"><!--
document.write(geoip_region());
// --></script> area.
If you're reading this in a web browser, there's something I have to get off my chest.
Clearly, Scott's making so much money that he's concerned about his privacy. He doesn't want money-grubbing relatives trying to get their mitts on the Google link fortune he has amassed over the past two weeks. Scott even had to change his name and become a bigamist just to keep these leeches off his trail.
Before investing in Scott/Corey/Jacob's business plan, please note the terms and conditions: "The initial shipping and handling charge of $1.98 S&H which includes fourteen (14) days worth of access to the online directories and training. After 14 days, you will be charged MONTHLY of $47.50 for the recurring monthly fee for the googleprofitsinsider.com membership. After the 30 day trial I will be charged $99 for the program."
You probably think that $1,118 in yearly subscription charges is a bit high, but think of it this way: If you're making $5,000 a month you can pay that charge and still clear more than $58,000 in yearly profit, minus whatever you spend on tuxedos, wives and bling.
How to Create a YouTube Time Link When Sharing a Video
It's easy to link directly to a specific time in a YouTube video. All you have to do is add a t parameter to the end of the URL that indicates the time position in seconds. Here's an example that links to Post Malone's Nirvana tribute benefit concert for the coronavirus pandemic 118 seconds in when the performance begins:
https://youtu.be/f7eaGcIyhPU?t=118
The t=118 parameter causes the video to begin playing one minutes and 58 seconds after the beginning. There's also a way to accomplish the same thing when embedding a video. Add a start parameter to the video's embedded URL in the iframe tag. The value of start should be the number of seconds to skip before playback.
For a shortcut to this command, pause a YouTube video, right-click the video and choose Copy Video URL at Current Time.
Here's the embedded HTML code for the Post Malone concert starting 118 seconds in:
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/f7eaGcIyhPU?start=118" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
This HTML markup begins the Post Malone concert at the designated mark once a viewer chooses to play it.
For a shortcut, pause a video, click the Share button underneath it, choose embed, and click the Start At checkbox. When you click the Copy button to close the dialog you'll have HTML code you can use for playback at that time.
Screenwriter: Watch the Watchmen Twice
As a fan of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel, I thought Watchmen was a terrific movie in spite of the excessive gore and the 17-hour run time. The comic's amusingly dystopian 1985 was captured perfectly -- President Nixon did not age well over the four terms he held office -- and I'm planning to see the movie again in IMAX, primarily for Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach and the incredible opening credit sequence.
See if you can spot the tasteless metaphor in Watchmen screenwriter David Hayter's open letter begging people to see the film twice:
If you care about movies that have a brain, or balls, (and this film's got both, literally), or true adaptations -- And if you're thinking of seeing it again anyway, please go back this weekend, Friday or Saturday night. ...
All this time, you've been waiting for a director who was going to hit you in the face with this story. To just crack you in the jaw, and then bend you over the pool table with this story. ...
You'll be thinking about this film, down the road. It'll nag at you. How it was rough and beautiful. How it went where it wanted to go, and you just hung on. How it was thoughtful and hateful and bleak and hilarious. And for Jackie Earle Haley.
Trust me. You'll come back, eventually. Just like Sally.
Sally's a female super-hero who suffers an attempted sexual assault on a pool table.
The Size of Your Twitter Makes Me Feel Inadequate
Dave Winer is criticizing Twitter over the suggested users feature, which was added recently to help Twitter newbies get more out of the service. In the past when you joined Twitter, if you didn't know anybody else using the service you'd end up with nothing to do, an experience akin to being the only person in an AOL chatroom, giving yourself A/S/L checks and telling yourself you just got home from cheerleader practice and it's time to get out of these sweaty clothes.
So Twitter now tries to buddy up new members with some big-name users like Michael Arrington, Ryan Seacrest and MC Hammer. These recommended buds end up with hundreds of thousands of people following them on Twitter. This has angered some people with tens of thousands of followers by making them feel small, though they pretend that's not the reason. Winer writes:
I pour a lot of effort into Twitter, and while I wasn't in the top tier of users, I was solidly in the second tier. I wasn't doing the things you have to do to get the most followers, or I didn't have a powerful media presence like Leo or Shaq to get me up there. ... It's now approaching 20,000, which I am proud of, but it's not very much compared to the numbers of some people who did nothing other than be friends of [Twitter founder] Evan Williams to get hundreds of thousands of followers. ...
Think about it this way -- do you know who wrote Apache or PHP? Do any of them have the power to deliver so much flow to an installation of their software? Imho, that's exactly the relationship Twitter should have with its users. Or the phone company and users of phones -- they shouldn't jump into a conversation and say (for example) "We know someone really cool you would probably like to talk to. We're connecting you to them now."
Seven years ago, Winer was running UserLand, which had just come out with Radio UserLand, software for publishing blogs and reading RSS feeds. Radio UserLand was a pretty big phenomenon at the time that had an appeal not unlike Twitter today. Users formed relationships by subscribing to each other's blogs, getting updates in real-time through the RSS Cloud API and republishing interesting items they found on their buds' blogs. (Kids today call this retweeting.)
Radio UserLand's RSS reader came with a default list of subscriptions, and the bloggers on the list got thousands of readers.
I wasn't on that list. I poured a lot of effort into Radio, and while I wasn't in the top tier of bloggers I was solidly second-tier. Former MTV veejay Adam Curry was on the list, and in July 2003 he revealed why -- he secretly paid Winer $10,000:
Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of Radio and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. To date I've been delighted with my purchase and although I haven't checked recently, I'm pretty sure Userland still has me in the defaults. ...
The $10k didn't 'just' give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I've built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.
So when Winer was in the same position as Twitter, his software included a paid placement, something he never disclosed to his users.
I try not to reach back into the Winer wayback machine too often, because I'd prefer that people forget how I used to pumice out his corns as we sat on the beach and discussed which of his inventions I liked the bestest. But his secret deal with Curry is worth remembering as he crusades against Twitter:
[Twitter board member Bijan Sabet] says that Twitter is the little guy, but to me they look big -- huge -- when they have the power to move people up the ladder so quickly, and introduce doubt about their relationship with individual users. When being in favor with Ev means so much. That's screwing the whole thing up.
Credits: Rogers Cadenhead has 156 followers on Twitter. Dave Winer's self-portrait is republished under a Creative Commons license.
Currency Exchange is a Nickel and Dime Business
Neil Steinberg's column today in the Chicago Sun-Times has a surprising ending. He writes about an interesting Chicago character, Arnie Berezin, who has run a small currency exchange business for years:
Neva Evans has spent most of the last decade in a Jewel shopping bag tucked away in the cluttered back room at the Ashland-Diversey Currency Exchange.
Or at least her earthly remains have, ashes in a funerary jar with a mother-of-pearl finish.
"Good morning, Neva," the owner of the currency exchange, Arnie Berezin, would say as he begins each day at 5 a.m. -- which he does, seven days a week, cashing checks and issuing money orders in a tiny alcove decorated with business cards and rolls of coins. A $400 money order costs 85 cents.
"I'm a nickel-and-dime business," says Berezin, 62. "We don't get rich here."
If anyone knows Lisa Grace, Michelle Grace, Felicia Grace, Patricia Baker, Iris Heard or Dwayne Adams, Steinberg has something for you.
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