Speaking of URL shorteners, I was just reading the latest Dan Savage column and noticed that he used a “tiny URL” to point to a blog post by Nate Silver.
Now granted, I was reading this online instead of in print, but I assume the tiny URL made it to the print version of his column — and thus realized that URL shorteners solve a gigantic problem for print media. A url like http://somecrazyurl/linkto/somearticle/at_this_site?articleId=whothefuckknows&somethingOrOther doesn’t translate to hyphenated newsprint terribly well, which in turn makes mentioning a specific web page (as opposed to a mere site) — and modern accurate attribution — an utter bitch.
URL shorteners are controversial. But up until this point, the issue has mostly been pivoting around the popularity of Twitter; Twitter is why URL shorteners exist, and their inability to do anything about the issue (like a built-in feature for exempting long URLs from the Twitter character limit) is why they persist. But if mainstream media like The New York Times start rolling out URL shorteners (ex. http://nyt.ly/123)… hm. Well, I dunno. From the perspective of a newspaper copy editor, I imagine it would be a godsend.
