URL Dyslexia

Tuesday, July 7th 2009 4:21pm

While moonlighting at my pizza delivery job on the 4th of July, I saw something interesting. Something special. Here in the States, most people bust out the BBQ for our Independence Day so we were more than slow making pizzas. There was a baseball game on the radio and my manager was keeping on top of the stats using mlb.com — my silly head kept reading Mutant League Football. Dyslexic much?

That is, until I noticed the whole domain read like "mbl.mlb.com/mlb/etc.etc.with.some.more.mlb's". Suddenly, I could not get it out of my head. MLB this. MLB that. I thought about all the times I racked my brain trying to remember URL shorteners like u.nu or bit.ly without opening twitter.

Here is the game he was watching. Notice that 'mlb' appears no less than five times in that URL. If there was ever a time to pull out MLF's "Kill the Ref" play, it is now.

I'm not really a sports fan which may seem obvious considering I read 'mlb' and got the title of an old Sega Genesis game and the wrong sport. It's not even the same acronym. If I was really on the ball I would have thought of Major League Baseball for the NES. These two games are rather similar in that, once you master the controls and timing, you can crush the hardest team with the weakest one.

I don't know how many times I have typed 'youttube.com' into my browser on accident. Sure enough, if you try it out you'll find a domain squatter waiting there. Technically, however, this is referred to as typosquatting and not 'dyslexia squatting'. Now we can argue whether 'youttube' is the result of a typo or dysgraphia.

Now, I know what you're thinking, "This guy isn't dyslexic, he's an idiot." And, well, that's yet another discussion. But I still have this question cycling round my head — "How many MLB's does it take to screw in a URL?"

posted by Langel

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