As I do my ‘radio round the world’ presentations, it’s the NPR stuff that makes people really sit up. I’ve detailed the really clever things that NPR do already: things like transcripts, a decent API, and their wildly successful iPhone app.

Add one more: because NPR has added their own shortlinks server.

Instead of a long link that destroyed the page layout when I added it here (and filled most of Twitter’s 140 characters), NPR are rolling out links for Twitter that look just like http://n.pr/114554281 (which is a blog page with more info).

NPR has brightly worked out that short-links are great, but being in control of them (and making them a little more humanly-checkable) is also important too. So, rolling out n.pr is a smart trick: and means that their shortlinks are obviously NPR’s.

They’re not the first to do it – the BBC do something similar for iPlayer links, by the way: http://bbc.co.uk/i/r3ssp gets rewritten to a rather longer URL. NPR’s Puerto-Rican domain name gives them extra kudos points, though.

And, incidentally, even I beat NPR to it this time. If you want to roll your own link-shortener, feel free to nick my code… though caution, there be bugs in it, particularly with URL-encoding.

What we, of course, now need is a simple standard to enable Twitter clients to examine the page being linked to, and use the preferred shortlink if there is one supplied. Media UK uses a construct like… link rel=”shortlink” href=”http://muk.fm/r/1″ which is apparently the way to do it, but I’ve no idea whether any clients out there actually use this HTML for shortlink discovery.

Anyway: well done, NPR. Another excellent thing you’re doing. (shakes fist)

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