I have been intrigued recently by some unusual looking URLs used by tech-savvy colleagues and finally got around to asking about them.
They introduced me to the URL shortener, Bit.ly. “Interesting, but why?” I thought.
It was only when I wanted to link to a provocative presentation on muliculturalism and democracy in a Twitter post, that I had an answer. 140 characters and a Youtube URL do not mix. Yet I hesitated… Not another online profile! But curious, I did a search. Brilliant! No need to create a profile. Just simply paste your long URL into a window, click convert and pick up your copy to paste. Easy!
For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5vABdO3LcA&index=19&list=PL2NbtHLOznJ0N3_gzgUwz5da1SY0yRj8a
becomes….
Message in 140 spaces achieved. “Really interesting lecture http://bit.ly/1JmVE9x on democracy and multilingualism at LSE. Are there implcations for AKL language policy?”