I’m personally not bought into the overall value of URL shorteners. I think the COGS are high, and you only monetize in nefarious ways:

  1. tracking visitors who who aren’t aware they are being tracked and selling their behavioral data
  2. getting a nice set of IDs and then adding a landing page (or even better, driving people to search instead of taking them to the content).

But… Bit.ly adds something different. they add nice stats and tracking which I find extremely useful (especially when I try to drive people to content via blogs, tweets and emails).

One of the neat things I found was a Bit.ly plugin for Windows Live Writer, check it out here

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You simply highlight the URL and it converts it into a bit.ly.

nice and easy to use.