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.
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