Read iMediaConnection’s 4 technologies that are killing the URL by Jonathan Richman earlier today and thought it was a good article.  Meant to post this earlier but my blog seemed to be down for part of the day (I think it’s due to DreamHost and the Cloud hosting environment ).

One point Jonathan makes is that most online traffic comes from search engines, anyway, and since the first few positions in the search results (of Google, for the most part) is all that most searchers ever click on, most of the traffic that could come to your URL, won’t ever.

He goes a little further out in saying that browsers like Google Chrome might end up bypassing search results and pick the best results for you, ahead of time, limiting choice even more; not sure I agree that’s happening – but I think it’s worth noting.  Jonathan mentions using Tiny Urls, while helpful for Twitter, defeat branding and also make it harder to track traffic, for a variety of reasons I covered in a recent post – has Twitter become more important than Google for traffic generation?

The last thing mentioned is QR codes- and you can imagine the difficulties site analytics would have tracking this  – as there are several actions (a simple program) that can be embedded into these codes.

QR codes are used in a lot of different advertising situations.

To me, what this says – you need to have  a strategy and measurement around it, to deal with the way your audiences are using emerging technologies and, to a large extent, businesses don’t have a clue.

Hmm … seems like this subject would make a great article for Entrepreneur.com -