Blog software that includes the headline in the url ruins things. I don’t know why, but if I show someone a link and it has the dumb headline in there, it somehow spoilers the story even when it’s not a story one would expect to be spoiled.
Am I crazy, or is the whole-story-in-url just a bad thing? Especially with photos.
Be My Blog 
Story in the URL is good for increasing search visibility. Not sure if that’s the explicit intention or just a happy accident, but it’s a factor.
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True, and “SEO” has now become way more valuable than usability or the actual (cringe at word) content.
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I say a lot about that in my latest blog post, which you can read here.
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hahahaha excellent
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i like headlines in the url, or a summary at least, or some other sort of useful hint at its content. helps me decide whether or not to click when it’s a bare url without much context (such as in the cases of lazy deliciousers, irc pasters, bloggers with snarky anchor text, etc).
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I get that. I think it’s more like sending someone an url that turns out to be blog/totally/hilarious/dog/bites/guy/in/last/3/seconds or /breaking/news/presidentwithoutpants where once you’ve seen the url there’s no point, and the fun of seeing the headline or the pic and going OMG is just punctured.
or you know, rickroll’d
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ok, here is an example where i agree: http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/funny-pictures-kittens-attack-feet.jpg
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I concur.
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Damn you, Jakob Nielsen
It’s all Jakob and SEO, now. His emphasis on using ‘microcontent’ to push the inverted-pyramid style to anything in an html H tag, and to the url itself, is part of the issue, I think. It’s great for skimming CNN, good for eliminating the ‘mystery meat’ quality that a lot of posting can take on, but it’s murder on stuff where the punch line or the payoff lies in any kind of surprise…
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I actually prefer the full descriptive URLs. example.com/blog/we-are-all-a-rickroll-now, to me, is more descriptive and informative (and therefore better) than example.com/index.php?p=1737886. I generally know whether or not I want to click it by the title. Even if it’s a “spoiler” like example.com/dog-bites-president-without-pants, I don’t mind. If it’s funny to see someone get bit in the nuts, it should be able to stand on its own; it’ll still be funny regardless of the title. If it was supposed to be a surprise, the original content poster should have named it differently.
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Description-of-photo-in-URL has completely ruined sharing icanhascheezburger photos on IRC.
It works fine for informative blog posts, though, and I love this URL shortener.
(And of course all SEO is sympathetic magic.)
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