I’m starting a series of posts on Personal Broadcast Networks (PBNs) that will expand upon the basic overview I’ve described in
this previous post. I’ve described the caching foundation stone as content delivery network services for bloggers. That basically sums it up. What’s a content delivery network? A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of many computers – thousands -- strategically placed all over the world to guarantee delivery of your content, increase web site responsiveness from the end user’s perspective, and guard against swamping of your site when you write something that everyone starts pointing to (e.g. Slashdot). How you use these caching networks varies with about as many CDN providers that exist. In most cases the first step to using caching means that you cede control of DNS for your domain over to the CDN provider since DNS is the starting point for content delivery. The next step is to modify the templates your site uses so that the caching software will store your site’s pages. Depending on how often you want the cache updated, you can only modify page headers or insert tags into your templates to tell the caching software to check for updates more or less often. Weblogs are already structured perfectly to make use of caching services. Caching isn’t just for web sites or blogs. Podcasts and other forms of digital media can be cached just as well, and, in many cases, better than web sites or blogs. In summary, caching is all about bandwidth arbitrage and availability insurance. It only makes sense to use caching services if the bandwidth on the network costs you less than what you are paying your primary host and can provide you greater availability to your end users. Ideally, you would serve your blog and all other media from your desktop at home and just pay an access fee and for the bandwidth you consume on the caching network. The other ideal scenario is that you just turn on the caching when you consume a certain percentage of your monthly allocated bandwidth from your primary host. Both of the scenarios are possible today. They just need to be customized for individual content creators. Drop me a comment if you want the technical details behind how CDNs work.
All we need is access to this big infrastructure. Individually, bloggers can’t afford these services since none of the CDN providers offer service packages for individual content creators. I’m working with various CDN providers to see if they would be interested in reselling their services through someone who will create packages specifically for individual content creators. Caching services will be the cornerstone of Personal Broadcast Networks.
