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:

tinyurl-in-print.png

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.