Grab bag: Getting, and not getting, the Web

It’s rare that NYT has a public web fail–generally they seem to understand how to work on the web. But nuking old URLs without implementing redirects is the worst kind of fail, because it kills conversation and reputation as well as content. I also wonder how many {{deadlink}}s there are on Wikipedia in references now because of this.

I like the “marketing” (editorial) short URLs, but I like the amzn.com/ASIN (Amazon stock ID number) even better. Every product on Amazon has an ASIN, so it’s easy to go directly to the product you want to point to.