Shortening URLs from Examiner.com

I imagine a conversation going like this.

Parent: I have a child with disabilities.

Me: What a coincidence. I have an online column about raising special needs children.

Parent: Great! What's the address?

Me: Examiner dot com slash x dash eight seven nine three dash phoenix dash...oh, you've walked away.

Those long Examiner URLs are fine in an email, forum post or other medium where people just have to click, but are useless for business cards or conversation. Luckily sites like TinyURL and bit.ly exist to convert long URLs to short ones.

Using them is easy. Go one of these short URL sites and paste the long URL you want to shorten. It will give a shorter URL that anyone can use to reach your site. These shorter addresses don't expire or get used by anyone else and the service is free. Users are taken directly to the destination without going through ads or anything else.

I use bit.ly for my Twitter posts since their URLs are a few characters shorter than TinyURL. With Twitter, every character counts. However I don't like using them for other purposes because people would find them confusing. "Where's the .com?" would be the reaction I'd expect.

So I use TinyURL for my main Examiner page. You can specify your own alias with TinyURL (bit.ly does this too) to create an address easy to remember. I may be http://www.examiner.com/x-8793-Phoenix-Special-Needs-Kids-Examiner but I'm also http://tinyurl.com/phxspecial - which one do you think is easier to remember?