vb.ly screenshot, courtesy of our own violet.blue.
Somehow, my desire to provide you with a simple link to my Google Voice how-to articles turned into a story of geopolitics, coalition warfare, Sharia Law, and adult-friendly material. Gosh, I love this gig!
Here’s the back story.
ZDNet has a mechanism for providing shortened URLs. If you subscribe to the @ZDNet Twitter feed, you’ll notice a lot of links of the form http://zd.net/kvUkBz (this one happens to point to Denise Amrich’s fun tea tech article).
I’d previously noticed that zd.net allowed vanity paths, and I wanted to create zd.net/googlevoicehowto that would point to my Google Voice articles.
Simple, right? So I asked my editors how to do it. Apparently, ZDNet has an enterprise license with Bit.ly, and we get our shortened URLs through Bit.ly’s URL shortening engine.
Sigh. This is when I found I couldn’t leave well enough alone.
Greaaaaaat. Not to be too snarky, but doesn’t it seem a bit weird to run ZDNet Government URLs through a top-level domain of a country we’ve been, you know, bombing? Just sayin’.
For that’s actually what’s going on. The .ly in the bit.ly domain stands for Libya, and it’s Libya’s top-level country domain. The swell guys over at Bit.ly have built an entire business around a TLD from a country run by a complete whack-job who the entire Western world has a hate-on for.
Now, y’all know I’m neither a hawk nor a dove. Sure, I love me my military hardware. I’m not thrilled with spending tax dollars on it, but I go all gooey inside over anything that can break the sound barrier or bust underground bunkers. But that’s more because I’m a gadget geek than because I want to see our troops sent into harm’s way.
I also strongly disagree with America’s participation in Operation Unified Protector (NATO’s interdiction program in Libya) and Operation Odyssey Dawn (the tax-dollar suck that is America’s part of the program).
I object to using America as international protector when we’re currently fighting on two or more fronts, indebted up to our ears to a possible enemy state, and have far too many of our own citizens living without homes.
I object to helping other nations before we get our own house in order.
It just seems like we’re behaving like that cousin we all have who enjoys telling us how to run our lives, but then hits us up for a loan because she’s unwilling to find real work. It seems irresponsible, like it’s easier to bomb some Libyans than protect our own citizens from the predatory practices of our health care, insurance, and banking industries.
But I digress. The subject of this article has to do with using a Libyan domain as the foundation for many of our URL redirects — and my opinion of the general foolishness (and mock-worthy fun) of that practice.
Bit.ly’s investors include Betaworks, RRE, AOL Ventures, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Social Leverage, The Accelerator Group, SoftTech VC, Ron Conway, Josh Stylman, Pete Hershberg, David Shen Ventures, Jeff Clavier, Mitch Kapor, Howard Lindzon, Chris Sacca, and Founders Fund. Some of these investors are pretty clever folk.
ZDNet isn’t alone in using bit.ly. Apparently USA.gov (uh, the official Web portal of the US Government) is using Bit.ly (and it’s oh-so-Libyan domain name) to run some of its promotions.
Heck, if you can’t bomb a nation into letting you use their top-level domain, what good is having the ability to project power all over the world? Of course, the fact that usa.gov also uses bit.ly gives this whole thing a delicious irony.
