Yesterday I shut down the 9 year old url shortening service qwer.org. I pointed all traffic from qwer.org to a penguin flash game with a banner ad at the bottom.

Scandal! Uproar! Mea Culpa! The kind of scandal that lead a social media pundit to email me this morning asking me to explain the series of events that led me to turn a link shortening service into a profit vehicle. The kind of uproar that causes a person to make an anonymous Twitter account for the sole purpose of asking me to explain my path to the dark side.

It all sounds pretty nefarious and nasty until you discover that the site was shut down because it had only two users: one a black-hat SEO driving traffic and pagerank to illegal pharma sites and a person who used the content-hosting features of Qwer to host Second Life patterns in a way that could be accessed in-game, and that his pages have been whitelisted for 4 weeks until I shut down stuff completely.

Average number of daily visitors to qwer.org? 11. Average number coming from somewhere other than Second Life? 3.

I hate being such a boring scandal.