I would use a URL shortener that included some description of the destination site. Perhaps just the domain name minus the top level. So something like:
xx.yy/nytimes-unique identifier
The shortness of the URL doesn't really matter all that much does it? From what I can tell they are used mostly for stat tracking. People are still mostly clicking or copy/pasting them. 5-8 more characters isn't going to hurt.
Today's URL shorteners are yesterday's redirect links. Used to be that we hated redirects and avoided them if we could; now Twitter has suddenly made them cool. If you get people to use your redirects/shortener you gain access to all those delicious traffic analytics on where the eyeballs are going today. Hence the land grab by google and fb in what used to be bitly's private domain.
If anyone else was confused by this, I believe it is in reference to http://goo.gl
I had not heard of that project until just now. It's nice to see they're giving it some thought rather than just slapping something together, but I'd love to see "longevity" added to the project goals.
Long URLs constantly disappear, but only one root at a time. If Wikipedia disappeared tomorrow, all the Wikipedia links would break, but URL shorteners consolidate roots. If bit.ly disappeared tomorrow, it's not just one site that is affected. Furthermore, the use of a redirect breaks traditional mirroring systems. You can't just prepend somemirror.com to the path and expect it to work.
cheap brand reinforcement. I'm sure someone will pay the Turkish domain registry enough to overcome their aversion to creating a high-level domain such as twi.tr before long: http://www.101domain.com/tr.htm
