I love the idea behind BitTorrent and came across software that adds bittorrent to anybody’s website. Blog Torrent makes it easy to blog either large files or files that may receive lots of traffic, like podcasts. I will be implementing this into my site as soon as I find some files to share.
One of the podcasts I listen to is Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. Today, he did something that’s new to distributing media content, he created a .torrent for his podcast. The idea behind this is that instead of all of his subscribers downloading the same mp3 file from his server, they share from each other. This ultimately lowers bandwidth demands on the server and in some cases may help the file(s) to download faster. The downside to this is that you have to wait till the whole file is downloaded before you can listen to/watch it since it doesn’t download in order but in pieces. This isn’t a major fault since most of the time the files are downloading while I’m sleeping or at work, so when I wake up or come home, they’re completely downloaded. There’s a lot of potential for this type of technology as noted over at this guy’s site.
I was reading on Slashdot that Microsoft has started a blogging site. It has a couple of nice points for a free site but I still like Blogger better. MSN Spaces has RSS feeds, a buil-in MoBlog, and trackbacks; which Blogger doesn’t offer but I can still have my Blogger page on my site instead of a long address like http://spaces.msn.com/members/dgstinner
Also on Slashdot, there’s a story about some networks screwing with PVR’s like TiVO and ReplayTV by adjusting the time of shows by a minute. So instead of a show running from 8:00 – 9:00, the networks would say that it runs from 8:01 – 9:01 which on some recorders won’t allow you to record another show at 9:00 because there’s still one minute left on the previous show. Of course if all networks did this, it would be pointless because then everything would be the same. I can see network families screwing with this, like Fox scheduling stuff at :01 and their FX network at :00.
In yet another article I was reading on Slashdot, Suprnova.org, which is the KaZaa of BitTorrent, is developing a file-sharing application to decentralize BitTorrent. With BitTorrent being centralized, it’s easier to figure who downloaded what files (centralized servers is what helped bring about the downfall of Napster before it became a pay service). They’re beta testing with 5,000 people right now but with how popular SuprNova and BitTorrent are, an application like this would be HUGE.
