random rants - banjax blog

Political Compass

I have just stumbled across the Political Compass website. It is fun to see where you stand on the Left/Right - Libertine/Authoritarian compass. Personally, I am delighted to be in close proximity to Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama!

Slashdot Discusses 'RSS meets BitTorrent'

That Wired News story (Speed Meets Feed in Download Tool) has now kicked off a fresh discussion on Slashdot.

Film Rights Sold on Ebay

Here's a weird and whacky idea reported by Outside the System - More on eBaying Film Rights.

RSS & BitTorrent For Law Libraries

Ernest Miller at Corante has written a blog post outlining how law libraries might use RSS and BitTorrent to efficiently distribute the full judgements of legal cases rather than just summaries - RSS, BitTorrent and Broadcatching for Courts

The feeds that Rory provides are great, but they don't include the full decisions - only summaries. You could use RSS enclosures, but providing full decisions to hundreds or thousands of recipients might tax bandwidth. BitTorrent to the rescue, of course. Why shouldn't every law library, law firm or other interested party broadcatch copies of every court decision published?

RSS & BitTorrent Round Up

Interest in combining RSS and BitTorrent appears to be exploding. Wired News has a great article by Paul Boutin - Speed Meets Feed in Download Tool. I particularly liked these comments:

Grumet claimed that by connecting RSS to BitTorrent, he solved the problem using two programs with which many Net enthusiasts are already familiar. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file-sharing system that optimizes bandwidth usage to enable its users to take full advantage of broadband connections, downloading a DVD's worth of data in hours rather than days.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML-based protocol used to serve news headlines and weblog entries in a streamlined, organized format that lets users subscribe to "feeds" of their favorite content.

and these:

"You wouldn't need to spend millions on servers," Winer said, because BitTorrent distributes its load among the system's users, letting them draw upon one another's unused bandwidth to share files.

Grumet seems less interested in corporate media wars than in the personal benefits of his demo. "I could ship my home videos to my family more easily," he said, claiming that with modern production tools, the biggest problem for amateur and professional moviemakers is no longer producing video, but delivering it to the intended audience.

Andrew Grumet has also explained how BitTorrent works as an RSS 2.0 enclosure. What is of most interest to me are these two explanations:

How to build an RSS feed with BitTorrent enclosures

Build an RSS feed with one item per .torrent file. Add an enclosure sub-element of item, that looks like this

<enclosure url="http://www.legaltorrents.com/bit/thinner-archives-vol-1.zip.torrent" length="25876" type="application/x-bittorrent"/>

Key point: the length field specifies the size of the .torrent, not the size of the BMO.

Here is a feed with enclosures for the latest .torrents from the LegalTorrents.Com site:

http://www.legaltorrents.com/rss.xml

What makes this interesting

First, RSS and BitTorrent complement each other naturally. RSS was designed to report freshly available content, which is exactly where BitTorrent shines. RSS 2.0 enclosures were designed to automate the download process that BitTorrent optimizes.

Second, combining the two should reduce the barrier to entry for small broadcasters. While not a new idea, video blogging has always borne a bandwidth cost. Combining BitTorrent's cost savings with widely available RSS emitting tools should, for example, make it possible for a small group of motivated people across the world to create their own news channel.

Apple Mac anecdotes

Ever want to know what it was like to actually make the Apple Macintosh? There is a great site with lots of anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer, and the people who created it.

More RSS / BitTorrent stuff

It seems that this RSS / BitTorrent thing is generating quite a lot of interest. Corante and Outside The System have been regularly mining this new seam:

13/03/04 Broadcatching Roundup
12/03/04 Grumet's Integration Tool
10/03/04 BitTorrent, RSS and Broadcatching, Catching On
08/03/04 RSS + BitTorrent Announcement Soon?
08/03/04 BitTorrent + RSS = Broadcatching
06/03/04 Broadcatching - The Early Days
03/03/04 Broadcatching - Not Broadcasting
02/03/04 BitTorrent + RSS = The New Broadcast

Andrew Grumet has just posted "Getting started with BitTorrent + RSS in Radio [BETA]". This is the first implementation of the merging RSS news aggregators and BitTorrent I have come across.