Randfish of SEOMoz has a blog post consisting 11 guidelines or best practices for successful URLs. As the blog implies, these points are based from an SEO perspective although they are also beneficial for commoun uses too.

Describe your content. Because URLs also get pasted, shared, emailed, written down and recognized by search engines.
Keep it short. [...]

Robert Scoble started a blog post about anti-marketing design site of his friend Markus Frind. He is Google’s #1 AdSense user in Canada, pulling in more han $10,000 per day from Google. His site is certainly not beautifully designed, but receiving millions of visits or tens of millions of page views every day.
Scoble thinks that [...]

There is nothing new under the sun. In blogging, if you can take other people’s blog posts, add your own spin, then you can start a new post to continue the conversation. If you have entirely new things to write about, start everything anew. Just you can’t copy the post verbatim and claim that to [...]

One thing about the blog that makes it unique among any other Web publishing platform, including conventional and static web sites, is the fact that it is interactive. Rather just posting your content and make it available for public viewing, you can also receive more feedbacks, if you choose to. How can a blog help?
Business [...]

Chances are you’ve noticed that although a blog is just another website you can browse through your web browser, there are certain characteristics and components of a blog that make it a blog and not a conventional website.
To know and build a better business blog, you ought to understand what makes a blog unique on [...]