Guardian Media has one for sale. The British publisher is peddling the “Inside.com” domain name, people familiar with the company tell me. Asking price, I’m told, is something north of $100,000.

If that name rings a bell, it’s probably because you used to dine on big, well-prepared plates of media-covering-media during the first boom, when Inside.com spent a lot of money trying to create an industry insider/outsider publishing business.

That didn’t work, and eventually paidContent’s Rafat Ali, an Inside.com veteran himself, bought up the domain in 2008.

The idea was to use the name as an umbrella for his collection of trade sites, and perhaps to help Ali open up a Hollywood outpost. But that never panned out, and if you head to Inside.com now it will direct you to paidContent.

Ali ended up selling that site and its parent company to Guardian Media in 2008, and left two years later. The British company once had aggressive plans to expand in the U.S., but it’s unclear what it intends to do now. Caroline Little, who was running American operations for the publisher, stepped down earlier this year.

I’ve asked Guardian for comment and will update if it has one.

Bit.ly has now raised about $14 million in a couple of years, but so far has only a nascent revenue stream: About 4,000 different companies have white label versions of Bit.ly’s URL shortener (the New York Times, for instance, uses Bit.ly to create addresses like this: http://nyti.ms/bm8lk2). But only some of them pay for that service, at a rate of $1,000 a month.

The real business, which Betaworks CEO John Borthwick says the company will begin to build out with its new money, is turning Bit.ly’s data set into money.

People clicked on six billion Bit.ly links last month, Borthwick says. And he imagines that all sorts of folks, from Google (GOOG) on down, would be willing to pay to license the data.

It’s worth noting that Yahoo (YHOO), among others, has been doing some tire-kicking around the service–maybe more, depending on whose story you’d like to listen to.

Other investors in this round include OATV, Mitch Kapor, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Joshua Stylman, Peter Hershberg and David Shen. The New York Times (NYT), as I have previously written, picked up a piece of Bit.ly this summer as partial payment for its work in in News.me, a yet-to-be-launched social news service for Apple’s (AAPL) iPad.

On Monday, Bit.ly announced partnership with several security firms, including Websense (WBSN), Sophos and VeriSign (VRSN), that it said helps to address that.

The three of them will provide malware and spam-detecting services designed to keep fraudulent links from making their way into Bit.ly URLs, which in turn are used extensively on Twitter, email and social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Services such as Bit.ly and TinyURL allow consumers to convert a lengthy Web address into a miniaturized one. They have soared in popularity in recent years with the advent of Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per post. Shortened links are also used in emails, text messages and updates on social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Bit.ly, for example, says consumers use its site to shorten 40 million Web addresses a day. However, since most link-shortening services are unprofitable start-ups, archivists and Internet users worry that if one goes under, its links would stop directing users to the correct, longer Web address.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

John Borthwick, who funded bit.ly via his Betaworks investment group, explains the details of his offer here, along with a bit of pro forma condolence for the demise of his competitor: “Sad day yesterday to see tr.im announce that they are shutting their doors, after failing to make a business of a nice service with a great URL.”

To me, that sounds a bit like a mafia don shaking his head a tad wistfully after hearing that one his old rivals got bumped off, then sending a big bouquet to the funeral. And I think that the tr.im team, as well as some of bit.ly’s other competitors, may take it in the same vein.

UPDATE: I spoke to Eric Woodward, CEO of Tr.im’s parent company Nambu Networks. As I thought, he’s uninterested in working with Bit.ly, either directly or via 301works, the third party archive Borthwick has proposed. His response: “Why would I want to upload all my of data to Bit.ly?” When I suggested that this might be a good move for his users, he allowed that it still might happen — if he can’t find a buyer for Tr.im. And that’s a distinct possiblity: Woodward said he has been looking for a buyer for the past few months, without success.

But Borthwick’s proposal also sounds like a good one to me. I’ll let the wiser Webheads explain whether it’s a real solution for the problem that tr.im’s failure will create for the Web, namely, the notion that lots of Web addresses, shortened for use in social Web services like Facebook and Twitter, will stop working one day.

And if you do think it’s a real problem and not just an annoyance for the service’s users, as well as for Web sites that got referral traffic from the service, then someone’s going to need to think of something. We’re going to see more of this.

That’s because if there is any business at all in URL-shortening, it’s going to be a scale business that ends up in the hands of a couple competitors, max. Just like search. And that means that dozens of mom-and-pop competitors (here’s a visual snapshot, taken last fall, of 117 URL-shorteners) are going to fall by the wayside.

Right now Bit.ly looks to be the Google (GOOG) of URL-shortening, and there is some griping that it got that status unfairly, via a deal with Twitter that made it the service’s default shortener last May (type a long Web address into the message box on Twitter’s Web page, and the service will automatically convert it into a bit.ly link–like this). Not true, says Borthwick–the Twitter deal helped, but it’s not responsible for the majority of Bit.ly’s traffic.

But there’s no reason for Borthwick, Bit.ly or Twitter to be defensive about the deal. If Twitter wants to pick a preferred vendor/partner/developer for any or all of its services, it should do so. It’s not going to do that very often; one of the main reasons that Twitter has taken off is the ecosystem of developers who have built innovative stuff using the service’s open architecture, and it won’t want to discourage that.

And if Twitter wants to work with someone it’s already doing business with–prior to Twitter’s most recent funding round, Betaworks owned a sizable slug of Twitter’s stock, via Twitter’s acquisition of Betaworks portfolio company Summize a year ago–there’s no problem with that, either.

In any case, the Bit.ly/Betaworks guys have other things to worry about. They still need to figure out how to take the data stream they’re mining from all those tiny Web addresses they’re making and do something useful/valuable with it.

Then again, so does Twitter.

Domain registrar VeriSign’s (VRSN) latest report on the state of the industry shows that while more than 10.1 million new Web addresses were registered in the fourth quarter, this was a 17 percent drop from the period a year earlier.

The report, which drew from data provided by VeriSign, domain-data provider ZookNIC and the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, also showed a yearlong decline: New domain registrations averaged 11.9 million in 2008, compared with 12.2 million in 2007.

The slowdown in new URLs is clearly a reflection of the recession’s impact, says VeriSign spokesman Tom Galvin. “Any type of broader economic weakness is going to affect” that, he said, and it’s something the industry saw in the early part of the decade as well.

Read the rest of this post