Gilby made the front page of news.com

[john_childs]

News.com did a story that mentioned Gilby's tinyurl site. Unicyclist.com also got a mention in the story. Cool!
Web addresses get nip and tuck--and spam
And the tinyurl link to the story.

Unfortunately the story was also about spam.

[daino149]

That was a great article, and only proves the well known fact that Gilby is the man. It is unfortunate about the spam thing. Dang Spammers

Daniel

[johnfoss]

That was awesome to read. Congratulations Gilby on getting some recognition for your innovation! I forget to think of TinyURL as something useful outside the unicycling community. It's one of those simple little things, like a post-it note, that is just super helpful. I hope Gilby is able to benefit from it financially.

[Gilby]

That article turned out pretty good.

Though the "Big Picture" of the story kinda twists the spam issue a bit. I suppose spam is a hot topic, especially with the new CAN-SPAM law (which I think actually legalizes spam, instead of canning it, but I haven't read the actual law for it), so if they emphasize the spam issue in the subject, they will get more people to read it. Who knows.

But, yes, spam is a problem for TinyURL, but it's manageble and easy to terminate the spammers TinyURLs. It wasn't a problem for the first 7 months, but the first complaint came in while I was away at UNICON 11. I wasn't actively checking my email during those couple weeks, so I wasn't able to take quick action and my ISP pulled the plug on the server (the same server unicyclist.com was on at the time). Luckily somebody from Toronto, who knew I was away at Unicon, looked up on the unicon website for a phone number and got ahold of Tom Daniels to have him tell me my server was down. Tom was probably the only person there with 'net access and was able to hook me up to get it all running again.