I’ve been spending a lot of time on Twitter lately. In order to share links efficiently on Twitter, you need to use link (or URL) shortening tools, which quickly take URLs that typically have a large number of characters and translate them to a shorter form that can squeeze into Twitter’s 140 character-max requirement per “tweet.”

TinyURL.com has long been my favorite go to way to shorten URLs. For example, the post I wrote yesterday has the following URL:

http://onlinemediacultist.com/2008/12/16/louis-gray-google-could-provide-a-democratic-version-of-techmeme/

Plug it into TinyURL.com and you get the following:

http://tinyurl.com/5z9w8n

It’s a great little service, and no wonder the site proudly boasts that it has already shortened more than 100 million URLs.

Now, Twitter and shortened URLs have been on mind in relation to thinking about Twitter as a “full-fledged publishing platform” (which I explain my thinking on here). Part of the equation has to do with giving “microbloggers” on Twitter the ability to get statistics and, yes, make money.

Mark Vermut was kind enough to point out to me on Twitter recently that:

bit.ly cli.gs and twurl.nl all offer the ability to track clicks, referrers, other linkers and geography from links

Therefore we see that URL shortening services are beginning to fill the need for microbloggers to obtain analytics about the information and link sharing work that they’re putting in.

But what about the making money part?

Adjix has been on my radar for a little while, a service that runs this tagline: Short Links. Tiny Ads. Big Payoff.

Some initial experimentation shows that two of those three statements are correct.

Running the same URL from the example I used above, the nice thing is that we get an extremely tiny URL to run on places like Twitter:

http://ad.vu/nwr

And it’s also a plus that when you click through an Adjix URL, the ad that runs at the top of the page is very unobtrusive. However, you need to rock a lot of adjix ad views and/or clicks in order to make anything substantial:

Linkers earn $0.10/1000 unique link views (10 cents CPM per unique link impressions) and $0.20 for each valid, unique, click-through. In other words, Linkers receive $0.0001/link impression and $0.20/ad click-through.

Yeah, in other words, not so much!

This week, I discovered Linkbee.com, which I’m messing around with at present. So far I’m pretty impressed, though the “money part” will not quite make your typical link sharer rich anytime soon either.

The interface is cheerful and clean, which always helps, and the performance time has been pretty fast thus far, which is crucial when you’re looking to shorten a quick URL and pop it into Twitter (Adjix by contrast can run quite slow). I also like that you can choose how your ad is displayed: interstitial, banner, or no ad at all. Interstitial views pay out at the highest rate ($1.00 CPM) while banner ads pay at $.50 CPM.

While those rates aren’t earth shattering, they’re not miniscule either, particularly when you consider that they’re not relying on a two click CPC model as Adjix is with their “higher” rate. In other words, Adjix gives you a $.10 CPM until the moment that you get someone to click your short Adjix URL and then click a text link that runs on top of the exit page. That’s a lot to ask for, so in my view Linkbee’s model is clearly superior thus far.

With information sharing such an important part of the social media and microblogging environments, I’m looking forward to seeing how URL shortening services continue to evolve.

Now let me explain.

Over the summer I wrote several pieces about this emerging idea called Blogging 2.0. My sense at the time was that successful bloggers (more on how to define this below) would need to continue to churn out valuable content, network effectively in their space, get linked by high quality websites, and so forth, but would also need to engage in the emerging social media space, on red hot communications platforms such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and Disqus.

In Blogging 2.0: from surviving to thriving, I wrote:

My sense is that there’s a galaxy of well intentioned and ambitious bloggers out there who are and will be trying to figure out how to find their way in this new and strange era of distributed conversations (i.e. you spend the time, brain power, expertise, and hard work to create and share a new idea on your blog and it ends up being discussed in any number of other places).

…successful Bloggers 2.0 need to dive headlong into the places where eyeballs are and conversations are being held. The idea is to make friends, share ideas, and above all else promote one’s personal brand with the hope that people will eventually find their way back to your blog. It’s “old fashioned” online promotion – make friends, show that you’re smart and have something to share, and the people will hopefully follow.

So my overriding theory was that activities outside of the “home blog” should hopefully in the end lead to increased activity and participation back on the home site.

Now we’re hitting the end of the year. Social media participation and engagement is more intense than ever, drawing time and attention spans ever further away from these very home sites, and that’s not really even touching on the “distributed conversation” side of things!

The basic question that I’m left with these days is a somewhat existential one I suppose: can participation on social media sites become its own good?

Or in slightly less lofty terms: can successful bloggers evolve into some sort of successful blogger/microblogger hybrid? In specific terms, this means less posts and less words and less engagement on home sites in favor of relatively more of all of that on social media and microblogging platforms.

My sense is that yes they can, and yes, they will probably have to in this quickly evolving environment.

To quote myself on Twitter today:

Meaning that from now on *probably* the best bloggers will also tend to be the best microbloggers/social media publishers, and vice versa

Now, back to the definition of “successful blogger” for just a second. Obviously this can mean many different things. If it means making money, the new blogger/microblogger hybrid will change the equation some. I’m particularly fascinated at the moment with advertising services (such as Magpie for Twitter and Adjix for link shrinking) that seek to bring revenue directly to social media participants. This industry niche is extremely new though and is struggling with initial resistance from purists even as start-ups in the space figure out their own business models. But the tremendous movement in the overarching social media space will surely bring more players, more competition, and innovation.

Aside from the money part, success may mean things like learning opportunities, personal branding, product/service promotion, networking, and all round high fun and online conversatin’. All of these things seem to play into the blogging/microblogging hybrid model extremely well.

All of that said, I wouldn’t be surprised to have substantially evolved (or you can say changed, perhaps!) opinions about this topic in a few months. That’s how quickly things are moving.