Re: Academic/commercial collaboration (emergency URL repair)

I'm running a student project that has as part of its remit the task of
looking at issues raised by this discussion (url repair-ish). We're actually
looking at how/if the Web can be used more effectively as a 'market place'
and I therefore wanted to know how people found sites outside using the Web
itself (ie search engines, Web adverts). We've done a count of products in
the home with websites printed on them (tou'd be amazed) and are currently
looking at flyers, posters, adverts on tv, radio and in the press etc etc to
see how prevalent they are. We're also asking people (via a survey) *how*
they find sites and if they see one advertised outside the Web how they
remember it. If we get anything 'meaningful', we'll  bung it into Brit HCI's
Interfaces. However, my starting point was that firms with short urls/ones
that use their name in the url are already a long way there as there's no
extra learning. I wonder if Amazon for example, would have been so pervasive
if it had the usual far too long nonsense characters and it hadn't bothered
with the poster campaign?????

I accept that getting 'customers' to stay on your site is important but I
suspect getting them to the wretched thing in the first place is the larger
problem and a memorable and meaningful url might be some? most? of that
battle... The idea of a 72 character limit horrifies me (the burden on
memory, the keystrokes, the opportunity for error etc etc). But not as much
as the idea that we have to *tell* people to *limit* to 72 characters. But
you're right. Even a limit of 72 characters would be better than some manage
now! (I'll get the student to do some counting).

So Tom,  I hate to disagree but I suspect  short is good but cryptic is bad.
In fact, maybe longer and non cryptic is better than short and cryptic
unless it's somehow memorable???  This reminds me of a conference we
prepared earlier so I'll stop :-)

Xristine Faulkner
SCISM, SBU.
[email protected]

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