Does the user.post API method automatically shorten urls?

I'd like to automatically ping whenever we publish a news story on our website, however, I need to know if the user.post api method will automatically shrink the url to a ping.fm/whatever url or if I have to do that myself before posting the update...

on a related note, is there any tracking in the ping.fm url shortener? we would like to keep track of how often our links are visited through our ping updates... thanks!