| Experimenting with Bit Torrent & RSS. I wish I could get it together to say more about this combination. Hopefully in the future. I think this might be big. You can download the Bit Torrent client here (MacOS X and Windows) if you want to play around with it. Sort of like a P2P program, except you don't search for files. Instead, you have to have a link to a .torrent seed file. This seed file then allows you to connect to peers, and download the target file in chunks from many different people at once. As you download bits of the file, you are also uploading bits to other people. So a server can seed a .torrent file of size x, and then n number of people can download it. But the server doesn't need x * n bandwidth, it only needs x * y where y is some very small number. Then the rest of the people downloading the file (n - y) will actually be downloading it from other people who are downloading it instead of from the original server. So the greater the number of people downloading at the same time (the larger n is) the *greater* the speed you will get (at no cost to the original server.) This is very good for large files that lots of people want at the same time. Perhaps it's the only way to do this. But, like I said, you can't search for stuff through Bit Torrent. You have to already know the URL of a .torrent seed in order to get started. For instance, here is a web site listing television show .torrents. Just open one of those URLs in Bit Torrent and it will start downloading (be patient, it can take a few minutes to connect and start - but then it will be very fast once it starts.) If that all makes sense, then the original link to the Bit Torrent + RSS stuff is just about making RSS feeds be able to contain .torrent links, and having the RSS feed reader automatically hand these links off to Bit Torrent. This way someone can publish a .torrent seed, say, in the middle of the night, your RSS reader would automatically get the link, and then automatically start the download. With this setup you could wake up every morning to hundreds of megs of fresh downloads, all without your intervention, just by subscribing to certain RSS channels. (Sounds a little like TV, no?) Anyway, I'm rushing, and this is not a good summary, but there is something very interesting here. I'll try to come back with better examples. |
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