While Blog Torrent and the specs to include torrents in RSS feeds are steps forward, they do not bring us much closer to Personal Broadcast Networks. What are missing is the infrastructure, varying service levels, feedback, and guarantee of distribution. The appearance of these items means that the interface to a PBN is beginning to take shape, but the infrastructure has yet to be molded to meet the demands of that interface and the varying requirements and sophistication of the content creators.

posted: 12:40:07 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

I'm confused by this post that Steve made. Does this mean that Radio will generate RSS compliant with this spec? Or, does it mean that Radio will contain a BitTorrent tool? Or, both? I hope it's both along with some way to create and publish torrents from within the Radio UI. This would be killer.

posted: 12:34:26 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

It looks like the race is one. There are now two (here and here) competing specs for including torrents in RSS feeds. It looks like the guys at iPodderX are trying to create a "podcast" namespace while Dave and Adam are working on creating a BitTorrent namespace. I like the idea of a BitTorrent only namespace because it is simple and does not call into question other RSS elements the way a Podcast namespace does. I don't like the idea of including hype is specs. The term "Podcast", in my mind anyway, refers to an activity and nothing singularly technical while the name BitTorrent refers to a specific, well known protocol.

posted: 12:30:01 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()    

A number of blogs I subscribe to have pointed to Blog Torrent this weekend. I had to go and check it out because of the projects I'm working on. From what I can tell, Blog Torrent is an evolutionary step for BitTorrent. I didn't download Blog Torrent and install it on my web server. However, I did attempt to download a torrent and create a torrent. I ran into a number of problems. Blog Torrent has two download methods: a plain torrent and "easy download." The "easy download" has the torrent file and a BitTorrent download utility packaged together in a single executable. From a security perspective, this is a bad idea especially given that the executable is generated on the fly when a file is uploaded. There is no way to be 100% certain that there is nothing else injected into the build process. The fact that this is entirely web based and does not require client software is a major step forward for BitTorrent, even though I was unable to successfully perform any of the advertised functions. The proxy and firewall issues need to go away. It looks like an applet of some sort is attempting to launch when I tried to upload a file. There should be no reason why an applet needs to launch in order to create a torrent. Blog Torrent does not solve any distribution problems related to serving up large media files. It only solves problems associated with the publishing and downloading the media files; albeit not very successfully at this point. Blog Torrent still requires peers to seed downloads for distribution. I highly encourage the team working on Blog Torrent to press forward. I believe they are heading in the right direction. Making complicated technology easier to use is always a worth while endeavor.

posted: 12:14:21 PM  permalink  trackback ()  comments ()