Sorry for the long comment but like you I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot (although my personal circumstances have recently changed so I won’t be pushing the plans I was making through).

I often need to link to sites where I don’t own / have access to the on-site analytics, but would like some sort of measure of the interest so using a url shortening service with analytics was an obvious way forward. (As a side note as another use I was also considering it in terms of handling the tracking for email marketing – combined with a seemingly retrograde step of moving back to plain text emails!)

I started to use cli.gs as my default URL shortener and generally I have been happy with it (although the recent new features from HootSuite and cli.gs downtime due to DNS problems with their ISP made me wonder if I’ve made the right choice).

In general I have the usual concerns about trusting cloud services, in terms of downtime, reliability, and especially link hijacking. Given all this I came to the conclusion some time ago that I ought to invest in a custom link shortening service for my institution.

Not being as technically minded as yourself I started talking to Pierre Far, who runs http://cli.gs about the possibility of running an own-brand cli.gs service for my university although I never got as far as talking costs with him. Since then I mentioned it as an idea to a few key people within our Computer Centre who also seem keen to progress this, although like you they would probably prefer to build their own solution.

I mention all of the above, because I think that any proposed solution probably needs to created/implemented at the institution level. Catering to the .edu community from your own domain may be too wide a brief. In effect because you become part of the cloud and could suffer from the same issues as any other part of the cloud, especially if you need to scale up. Therefore I’d suggest that any edutxt solution probably needs to be open source for local implementation.

In case you haven’t seen it – I’d strongly recommend this post http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/01/11-best-url-shortening-services-vote-your-favorite/ as although it’s a couple of months old it talks through the key features that you might want to consider. I’d also highly recommend the cli.gs blog as it might give you some other ideas.

I think bookmarklets, explaining things like integration with Firefox add-ins (especially things like the URL bar add-in), API access and shortening, timing and tweeting links from RSS feeds are all going to be the key features to get right.

I have more thoughts but this comment is already quite long. I’ll definitely be watching with interest and would certainly be happy to do some alpha-testing with you if you need volunteers.

Best wishes for the project,

Brendan