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Bit.ly isn't just the most popular URL shortener. It's also an easy way, if you customize the domain name (an option the site freely provides), to claim a memorable domain name for what seems to be forever. While many bit.ly domain names coincide perfectly with their purpose – bit.ly/obama, for instance, redirects a reader to barackobama.com – others are random, or out-and-out funny.

It's safe to assume that many people don't really realize that their quick abbreviations will last forever. Bit.ly/Obama (capitalization in bit.ly domains makes a difference) takes the reader to a blog post about the then-candidate's 2008 speech in Berlin. It's outdated, now, as is bit.ly/ladygaga, an image of the pop star's first Rolling Stone cover hosted by Popcrunch; bit.ly/bieber, a site called "Twitter Trends" that stopped gathering Justin Bieber news in April; and bit.ly/justinbieber, a CNN profile from October 2009.
But I was looking for John McCain!
Bit.ly domains are a microcosm of the internet – they're ingrained in stone, surviving long after the public's interest. Bit.ly/pelosi, likely assigned by a non-fan of the House Speaker, redirects to a critical Washington Post article; Bit.ly/NancyPelosi redirects to a post on ResistNet.com, "Home of the Patriotic Resistance," that's since been taken down, though its domain name, "http://www.resistnet.com/forum/topics/ahhhh-look-at-we-the-foolish," gives some idea of what it might have contained. Pelosi's staff can put whatever they like online, but her domain name on bit.ly, not subject to claims of cybersquatting, can never be reclaimed from their attention-seeking adversaries.

But I can control one Bit.ly address: Bit.ly/urlesque.

The Republican Party can never get back bit.ly/republicans, which leads, ironically enough, to a CNN article titled "Republicans Twittering Away Credibility." Nor can John McCain (bit.ly/mccain redirects to the Wikipedia entry for George W. Bush), nor Eminem (bit.ly/eminem leads to a British newspaper article from 2009 questioning the rapper's relevance), nor Paris Hilton (bit.ly/parishilton, less maliciously than cannily, leads to the ticket-selling website StubHub).
random colors, at bit.ly/marijuana
Some bit.ly users, unmotivated by ideology but interested in eyeballs, follow StubHub's lead, knowing that boredom will bring them traffic: bit.ly/porn leads to the personal site for James Vreeland, whose biography states that he "co-founded Me-trics, a site specializing in personal analytics."

He clearly knows what web users like, as did Gawker's tech site Valleywag, who seem to have claimed bit.ly/poop; ThinkGeek, an online store selling "stuff for smart masses," who have bit.ly/fart; and whatever sly creature set up bit.ly/sex as a RickRoll. (Meanwhile, bit.ly/lolcats sends its innocent reader off to hardcore porn.) Unlike bit.ly/aguilera, which sends the reader to a Christina Aguilera fansite, bit.ly/britneyspears redirects to savvy web-celeb iJustine's page.

One set of links reveals the dueling impulses -- business and fun -- that fuel this corner of the web: bit.ly/cocaine leads, in a smart business move, to the Amazon page for Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, while bit.ly/marijuana leads to a web page called "Random Colors," whose stripes' hues change delightfully with each refresh.

I was disheartened to see that bit.ly/dan had already been snatched up by Daniel Upton, a digital artist. The web-savvy have built Bit.ly connectivity into their sites -- they heard about it first, surely. Bit.ly/jake belongs to "an 18-year-old web developer"; bit.ly/robert went to to the resume of an NYU doctoral candidate; bit.ly/erin went to the Facebook profile of a Cal Tech graduate, whose Facebook URL is lengthier: "speleology," or the study of caves. Much like a custom Facebook URL, if less heralded, these vanity domains went to whoever got there first.

Certainly, major players on the web are no wiser about snapping up their bit.ly names than are celebrities, politicians, or you and I: bit.ly/gawker leads to an article from Election Day, 2008. This is the face the site is now stuck presenting to the world, but at least it's a face they made, at some point; bit.ly/jezebel leads to a fan's acoustic cover of the Iron and Wine song "Jezebel." Bit.ly/huffingtonpost leads, somewhat mysteriously, to a Google search for "reported by diggers as possibly inaccurate huffingtonpost.com," while even bit.ly/google isn't what you'd think – it leads to a Picasa album of Google's Zurich office (which looks great!).

Of course, Google or Gawker hardly need to be URL-shortened – visitors to those sites can just enter in the already nice, short URLs. But there's clearly some readership to be gained with bit.ly, even if it's just from bored web-crawlers who've just realized that bit.ly domains exist, or are searching for the best of what's out there concisely. There's clearly something to bit.ly domains, or else Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon wouldn't have reserved their own names (or had a friendly customer help out), and Vitzy.net, a strange, sad little Google search partner, wouldn't have claimed bit.ly/youtube and bit.ly/yahoo.

Similarly, Techlist, a spam-tinged partner, has reserved the likes of bit.ly/democrats, bit.ly/melgibson, bit.ly/mnightshyamalan, and bit.ly/angelinajolie, among others. Parent-directory.com, an undeveloped Go-Daddy domain, dominates terms both dull and scandalous: bit.ly/drugs, bit.ly/viagra, bit.ly/cash, bit.ly/dogs, bit.ly/cats, and even bit.ly/bitly lead to a Bit.ly page warning that Parent-Directory is "potentially problematic."

The search-engine optimizers aside, boredom, tinged with alternating jokiness and servicey-ness, motivates this industrious little world. Bit.ly/vagina takes you to a weather forecast for Vagina, Russia; bit.ly/penis is a Sydney Morning Herald article from 2008 about drug raids. Someone, somewhere set that up as a joke, but they also wanted to share the website with someone close to them – "/penis" was funny for a moment, but the article was useful for whomever was sharing it, and it's up there, online, associated with male genitalia for some inscrutable reason, forever.