Example of a short URL in print
In the May-June 2009 issue of British Archeology section "on the web" there is a list of "Historic landscapes on the web":
Excerpted for demonstration only:
...
- Historic Liverpool – www.historic-liverpool.co.uk
- Such urban archaeology on the web as this is rare, and when you look at the attitude to sharing information and software you will like it even more
- Paleo Indian Archaeology on DoD installations –www.cemml.colostate.edu/paleo
- An academic site, but I could not resist the link between prehistory, shorelines and the US Department of Defense
- The Battlefields of the Somme – www.somme-battlefields.com
- Driven by visitor logistics, maybe, but there is a wealth of detail from landscape reconstruction after the battles to the sites (and poets)
...
Note that in this online version of the article, all the URLs (http:// implied) refer directly to sites. However, in the print version, note the difference:
Note that the print entry for Paleo Indian Archaeology on DoD installations uses tinyurl.com (a 3rd party URL shortening service) instead of a direct URL, with the implication that this TinyURL's cryptic sequence of numbers and letters can be unambiguously read and retyped by a human browsing the magazine (or perhaps scanned in by OCR).
Thus only unambiguously human readable characters should be used in a shortened URL, bot in general, and especially in a shortened URL consisting of a series of numbers and letters.
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