The inspiration for this blog post came to me when I was lying on my sofa reading the Guardian newspaper over the weekend. I was at home and so didn't have any of the following to hand:

• iphone
• pen
• regular phone
• internet

Now, you might think they're not really essential tools for reading a newspaper but you'd be wrong. While reading the paper I was struck, time and time again, by the use of TinyURL to encode long links into a newsprint format. Of course, not having any of the above tools, I had no way of either visiting the URL or noting it down for me to visit later.

Being a kind of lazy person (it was Sunday afternoon, give me a break!), rather than look up the tinyurl online or noting it down for later reference, I just shrugged my shoulders, decided I wasn't THAT interested in visiting the link anyway, and moved on to the next article. For me, this is a huge wasted opportunity for the paper and also a frustrating experience for the reader. So what's the solution? Well, before I dive into the solution, let me explain the problem a little more clearly.

Why do newspapers use TinyURL at the moment?

The overriding reason I can see for newspapers to use TinyURL at the moment is that it's short. Printing tinyurls saves valuable space which otherwise might be wasted. Printing a URL like this:

http://tinyurl.com/55mp6b

Takes up much less space than printing a URL like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

And even less than a URL like this:

http://shop.ebay.co.uk/items/__rock-roll_W0QQ_nkwZrockQ20rollQ20QQ_cqrZtrueQQ_nkwuscZrickroll?_rdc=1

Given the popularity of tinyurl, I've seen many many examples of them in the real world, ranging from the Guardian to the WPT magazine all the way up to the New Scientist. In short, almost everyone is using them. And they should all stop.

What's wrong with newspapers using TinyURL?

I touched on some of the reasons why they don't work that well above in my heart-rending tale of an internet marketer too lazy to move off the sofa, but here's the complete list:

1. You can't remember them. "Oh great, an article about quantum physics, that looks really interesting. I must remember to check out tinyurl slash x x 2 3 5 h j next time I'm at a computer." This makes them difficult to use unless you physically take your paper to your computer or you happen to have a photographic memory. (I know that these days you can now choose a custom alias for your tinyurls, but none of the newspapers use them.)
   
2. There's no branding. When you see a tinyurl you are effectively clicking blind - you have no idea what kind of site you're being taken to and there's no trace of the site you've come from.
3. No tracking! Tracking, tracking ,tracking. The mantra of everything you do online has been lost when you use TinyURL - you don't know how many people clicked the link, you don't know if for some reason one of your TinyURLs was copied and pasted into an email to 1000s of people. You just don't know. (I know that some services offer pretty neat tracking services, especially bit.ly, but that doesn't negate the other points listed here.)
4. No control over the URL shortening service. Do you trust TinyURL? How long might they be around for? What happens if they have a massive data outage tomorrow and all your URLs 404? Think that's farfetched? Check out zi.ma - this used to be a URL shortening service and now all the URLs 404. Over 67,000 links to the zi.ma domain!
   

What should they do instead?

Build their own URL shortening service for use exclusively by their journalists! To a technophobe like myself this seems like a lot of work, but I'm assured that it really rather simple to build a service like this - Rob knocked up Twadl, a URL shortening service in a weekend (not to belittle your achievements, Rob!).

What advantages would this have?

Well imagine that instead of using a TinyURL the Guardian used a URL like this:

links.guardian.co.uk/apr/12

or

links.guardian.co.uk/rickroll

This would then allow them to get around most of the downsides listed above: short URLs that they have control over, are able to track and are stamped with the Guardian's brand. There's one problem though that this doesn't solve...

What about the problem of remembering these short URLs?

So using either of the two formats above (one being date & numerical based and the other being alias-based), they're still not that memorable, so how do you get around this? How about creating a links page on the newspaper site which lists all the recent short-links that have been used and a brief, twitter-like description of what the link is? That way, not only do you know where to go when you forget a short link, but that page becomes like an editorial Digg or Reddit page which can demand a high volume of traffic in its own right. After all, the external links that are being dropped into the paper every day are a valuable commodity - people are always on the lookout for interesting thing to click on, and that's exactly what that page offers.

Examples from the wild

Two examples from the UK press, one doing it well and one doing it badly:

The good - The Metro use short redirect URLs quite regularly to direct traffic; for example, check out www.metro.co.uk/cats, which 301 redirects to a metro blog post.

The bad - Check out this page from the Guardian, which links to no fewer than 13 tinyurls. Regardless of your position on using TinyURLs in the print version of the paper, there's absolutely no reason to use them in the online version!