For the record, this post is not at all about The New York Times. Almost all of the major news sites do something similar.
Here is a completely random URL from a post in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/us/13emissions.html?bl&ex=1189915200&en=ece3e83bef34f856&ei=5087%0A
I think I found that one by clicking through from Google News or Yahoo! News. The stuff after the question mark is junk they use for statistical tracking. I don’t like being a statistic. Plus, I don’t like including weird numbers that I’m not sure what they stand for in a link. Instead, when I put links into my blogs and happen to think about it, I try to stript the URL down as much as I can and still end up at the page I’m linking to. In the case above, it can be stripped down to this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/us/13emissions.html
That’s quite a bit smaller, cleaner, and easier to read. Plus, since I have no idea what those values are that are getting sent in the first URL, I’m not completely comfortable including them in a link. Are they personally identifying? Probably not. But it is easy enough to get rid of it and not have to worry about what might be hiding there.
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