Yesterday, Joshua Schachter had an excellent piece on the perils of the URL shortener: it's clear, concise, and scathing. Jason Kottke and Dave Winer had a few suggestions on how to mitigate the problem, or get us on the right track to eventually deprecating the use of URL shorteners.
I agree with Schachter's assessment, and I think Kottke and Winer are on the right track, but I think the URL shortener problem is far greater than what Schachter enumerates: no longer satisfied with controlling the initial click, URL shorteners have decided to add toolbars to promote ther content or to sell adspace: the most notable and recent addition to this group is Digg's toolbar, DiggBar. Dubious utility aside, they are trampling in the garden of an angry god.
