Saw a link this evening in Danny Sullivan's feed to Bit.ly Pro. Not sure when this was announced, there are no references to the product in Google News.

Read over the FAQ. This is basically the service I wanted to create with Bit.ly when we started it up in the summer of 2008. But it's apparently missing one key component, the freedom to switch to a different service. Once you've chosen to map a domain to bit.ly, if you map it to another service, all the links you created with bit.ly break.

There is a way for them to provide the ability to switch, Joe Moreno at Adjix did it. Bit.ly could echo all your shortened URLs to an Amazon S3 bucket that you control (and pay for, btw). If you decide to switch, just change your CNAME to point to Amazon. Or give it to a competitive service that you like better. This protects your choice, and protects all of us if Bit.ly should fail.

8/19:09: How to Fix URL Shorteners.

Now I could be missing something, I hope I am. But I'd get the answer to the question before I bet my future on any URL-shortening service.

 2/5/2010; 10:11:26 PM.   .

I'm in California, where it rains a lot but snow is pretty rare.

That's why a honkin winter storm is so interesting!

If you're getting dumped on in Washington or Baltimore or where ever, how's it going? Any accumulation? Pictures!

 2/5/2010; 7:04:12 PM.   .

This is a networking experiment to see if I can connect with people in NYU's Computer Science department through the readers of this weblog. ">

Me: I'm a visiting scholar in the Journalism Institute for the next year; working with my friend Jay Rosen and his students on several interesting projects. While I'm there it would be interesting for me to catch up on how Computer Science is taught these days, and perhaps talk with some students about how I got where I am and see if there's any interest in working on some projects while I'm in NY in 2010 and 2011.

Here's my CV. To get in touch, please send an email to dave dot winer at gmail dot com. Haven't got my NYU email address yet (next week, I hope).

Update: NYU Computer Science Students Make Awesome iPhone Apps.

 2/5/2010; 9:26:08 PM.   .