On 5 Jul 2006, at 11:54 AM, Sam Hooker wrote:
BTW: for the future, does anyone have any (possibly political? privacy-related?) objections to consolidating things like the Google Maps URL to something "newspaperable" from tinyurl.com?
I can think of some negatives to using tinyurl, which may or may not apply in all cases: a) as I used to read /. quite regularly (and still do at least skim the RSS feed), I'm grown to by highly suspicious of what might be lurking behind a redirecting URL. I suppose that phishing concerns and similar attacks may be even more worth worrying about from this aspect than simple visual attacks of the goatse kind. I realize this *shouldn't* be a concern in trusted communications coming from a reliable source, but distinguishing "coming from a reliable source" from "coming from what appears to be a reliable source" is often non- trivial and I think it's best to encourage a healthy level of paranoia in this respect.
b) it affects Google indexing. In the case of Google Maps, that doesn't really matter; however, if it was a link to a long URL holding some useful tutorial or utility, providing the direct link may be beneficial to future users looking for the same resource. (Obviously this is of limited concern with printed distribution, but I'm assuming that the same info release goes to online and printed news sources.)
c) if the publishing entity gets one character wrong in the tinyurl listing, you're done. If they get one character wrong in a traditional URL, it's much more likely to be human-parseable and correctable (oh, that must be maps.google.com, not naps.google.com), although this may be offset by the likelihood of getting more than one character wrong in the longer URL.
Perhaps a better solution would be to keep the meeting info URL on the website as simple as possible and make that the only URL in general releases? (which seems to be the approach taken in the newspaper listing you presented)
Kevin Broderick [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.kevinbroderick.com/
