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John Chow so called Dot Com Mogul is holding a new contest and the winner will receive $6000 CASH! The $5,000 would go to the charity of your choice and $1,000 will go to you to spend however you want. The conditions for entering in the contest are:

1. Sign up for an account at XR.com
2. Write a blog post about the contest, post should link back to the contest post, include the name of the charity you’re playing for, what you’ll do with the $1,000
3. Write a review of XR.com, you must link to XR.com using the keyword Tiny URL

If I win, I would give the $5K to Bihar Flood Relief Fund by JIH, and the $1,000 will be use to bought a laptop for myself and a Smart Phone (iPhone or BlackBerry Strom) as a Christmas gift for me.

The contest is being sponsored by XR.com. XR.com is a tiny URL service that will shorten your long URLs into very small text (3-50 characters), for use with status updates in social networks like twitter, plurk, identi.ca or yammer or using in your blog, email or websites.

Why we need to shorten the URL anyways? The reasons

1. First Obvious reason is in micro blogging sites: There is a limit on the characters to use, sites like Twitter and Plurk only allow 140 characters per message, so long URLs will never be included in the messages.
2. For better user experience/readability: xr.com/w3p this URL is always better than this long, ugly and scary URL http://www.w3planting.com/2008/12/design-your-css-xhtml-layout-on-the-fly/ (unsavvy people might think it was a virus and won’t click on it!)
3. From SEO prospective: people are more likely to click on user friendly links, the more they click on the links the more chances of increasing page rank (should you put your links according to SEO tactics)
4. Generating Revenue: people use these sites to costume affiliate links, resulting in increase affiliate profits.

You have a choice to choose best among the tiny URL services, Undeniably, xr.com the most visible URL shortener service, used extensively in social media, and is better than the alternatives, not only because you have the best name (you have the option to enter the 3+ character to display in the URL i.e. xr.com/your3ormorecharactors), but also it’s fast and simple i.e. you can add a bookmarklet to your browser and with the click of that shortcut, it will convert any URL into a tiny url which is copied to your clipboard.

If you wanted your long URL to be shortened, you must consider XR.com. They are a great service. Sign up for an account and check it out yourself!

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