A few months ago I had a post about URL shorteners that allow the addition of personal nicknames. TinyURL, the most popular shortening service, wasn’t on that list. That was then.
TinyURL now supports “custom alias”. The service is optional. Just type in a word or phrase that of your choosing. You may use letters, numbers and dashes. Note: If someone’s already used the URL, you can’t use it.
According to Therese Bottomly, the newspaper’s policy is to refrain from using TinyURL in published stories unless there’s absolutely no way around it. OregonLive apparently wants the original link established on its site, and we then cite that link. The thinking is that we direct readers to OregonLive, not to another site. I know, it doesn’t make sense to me either. But reporters and editors ought to get clarification from Therese before using TinyURL in a story.
Comment by keepportlandweird — September 5, 2008 @ 12:13 am |
KPW: Thanks for pointing that out. I don’t really have a problem with that policy. That doesn’t mean we can’t use url shorteners. I used the example above in an email correspondence today because I thought it was too much to copy and past into groupwise.
Comment by Lynne — September 5, 2008 @ 5:13 am |