in this way, content owners will know where their traffic is coming from, people who place shortened urls don't have to do anything special and the pasted urls remain short. the only downside is a slight increase to latency to retrieve the second redirect.
1) user clicks on http://sho.rt/abcdef located on http://original-referrer.com
2) sho.rt redirects to http://sho.rt/abcdef?original-referrer=http://original-refer...
3) second url redirects to the content.
in this way, content owners will know where their traffic is coming from, people who place shortened urls don't have to do anything special and the pasted urls remain short. the only downside is a slight increase to latency to retrieve the second redirect.