Newspapers and url shortening
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 by Dave Winer.
Commenting on yesterday's piece, Hanan Cohen says that newspapers in Israel use TinyUrl to publish web addresses on paper. This is both a good idea and not such a good idea. 
First, it's a good idea because it saves space and in print, space is at a premium.
But they're leaving money on the table. If they used their own web address they could monitor traffic, see how many clicks each location in the paper generated. Maybe stories on the op-ed page generate more clicks than those on the front page? Maybe stories by Ms. Jones get more clicks than those by Mr. Smith? There's also a chance to reinforce the brand, and drive more traffic to your site as opposed to tinyurl.com. And it's good for the web, because it helps keep us from centralizing too much on one site. Lots of reasons to put up your own url shortener.
So someday you might see urls like this in the NYT...
It's going to be a busy day here, so probably not too many posts. If you're in the US, good luck in your travel or prep for the big holiday tomorrow.
Tomorrow is also the day when the OPML 2.0 spec is finalized. If you have any further comments, this is the last minute! As they say, speak now or forever be a troll turkey. 
Otherwise, we'll have a new official format to deploy starting tomorrow.
