There has been a lot of praise for bit.ly, the new entrant in the URL shortening field created by betaworks. Now I do on occasion have a need for URL shortening for either tweeting or emailing, but other than that I consider the practice harmful (it should not even be necessary for email if email clients weren’t so awful). Why do I consider URL shortening harmful? First, because good URLs convey a ton of information. For starters, there is the domain itself, which gives me a good idea of what...