Interesting.  Kryogenix has a good guess at how Googlism works.  Based on a quick grep of my site and my blog, I'd have to say he's close to 100% right.  Thanks! [ Go ]

From Simon comes Jeremy's guidelines to Why You Want Short URLs.  Jeremy is like 1000% right on this one. 

• Short URLs mail better. They don't wrap and break.
• Short URLs are easy to read over the phone.
• Short URLs can be memorized when used often enough.
• Guessable URLs keep the hackers and geeks happy without affecting the 99.9% of normal users at all. [ Go ]

A real issue with my mailing people my Radio stuff is that a Radio url is huge.  I understand why but I have to wonder about it.  Given that the starting token of a radio url is so damn long already (radio . weblogs . com / user num / ). 

And I'd have to agree with the memorized comment.  Although I couldn't always rattle off a url exactly from memory, in the right context, when I'm about to use it, they tend to come to me quite easily.  Now I am admittedly not a big fan of bookmarks so perhaps I memorize more than others but there's more of this going on than people admit.