I've been after Tantek to explain Whistle (his url shortener) to me for a while now, and I was glad that it fit in with this series of questions. I particularly liked his point about the url being expandable by any third-party because the algorithm is published.

Obviously this prevents some "monetization" of the shortener, but that's the whole point - to prevent your links from being beholden to a single provider.

I'll be continuing the series of interviews as we work through the 10 basic components of Tantek's personal DiSo 2.0 vision.

I haven't heard of the idea of algorithmic link shortening before but it makes a lot of sense.

Found this and Tantek's custom "personal publishing/syndicating/tweeting/updating web application" Flacon (http://tantek.pbworks.com/Falcon) really interesting. The implementation on his personal site leaves something to be desired design-wise but I really like the ideas behind it.