Freecache has got me thinking about whether all these url redirection services are evil or not? Most of the url shortening services are pretty useful, and can come in handy for reducing Google Juice to people who you want to link to to illustrate a point, but don't want to credit.

Of course EvilURL is the best service for this; being profane, insulting, juvenile, and frequently very funny to boot.

Notlong.com highlight some of the downsides of the various services, the lifetime, privacy and guessability implications being pretty big in my book.

Finally the solution for slashdotting, or just the poor man's Akamai? Freecache from the Internet Archive aims to bring easy to use distributed web caching to everyone.

If you've a file that you think will be popular, but far too popular for your isp's bandwidth limits, you can just serve it us as http://freecache.org/http://your.url/yourfile instead of the traditional http://your.url/yourfile and Freecache will do all the heavy lifting for you. Plus your users get the advantage of swiftly pulling the file from a nearby cache rather than it creeping off your overloaded webserver.

Cool stuff, thanks to Matt Croydon for the heads up.

Compare and contrast.