OK, really must stop avoiding what I'm supposed to be doing (writing a paper, already missed the deadline), but continuing the theme of LSIDs and short URLs, it occurs to me that LSIDs can be seen as a disaster (don't work in webrowsers, nobody else uses them, hard to implement, etc.) or an opportunity.

Short URLs have been a topic of discussion recently, perhaps sparked by the article URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use?. Many will have encountered short URLs in Twitter tweets. Leigh Dodds (@ldodds) askedI guess Leigh's talking about the need for short URLs in tweets, but I wonder about the more general question of why we need URL shorteners at all.