Thomas Rid thinks through an academic conundrum:
How should links be quoted? With http://? with “accessed on 3 May 2008?? There’s no generally accepted standard, although some journals have their own — evolving — standards. Even the “accessed on …” only lends credibility to a quote but does not necessarily help to find the lost source, say with the Way Back Machine or another internet archive; it may just be gone.
… So what to do? Here’s my answer. The best solution is, of course, to quote no URL at all, and instead use author, title, publication, date, etc, so that everybody who’s heard of Google can find the publication any time, even for online-only sources. – But sometimes using a web address is helpful or required. In that case my suggestion is to use bit.ly, the most popular link shortener.
The Dish 