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RSS & BT Together?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the duct-taping-together-the-next-generation-of-p2p dept.

AntiPasto writes "According to this Yahoo! News article, RSS and BitTorrent could be set to join in a best-of-both-worlds content management system for the net. Possible?" Update: 03/17 21:39 GMT by T : Thanks to Steve Gillmor, here's the original story on eWeek to replace the now-dead Yahoo! link.

7 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. RSS polling intervals by tcopeland · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Now, should an aggregator be polling every 30 minutes? The convention early
    on was no more than once an hour. But newer aggregators either never heard of
    the convention or chose to ignore it. Some aggregators let the users scan
    whenever they want. Please don't do that. Once an hour is enough. Otherwise
    bandwidth bills won't scale."


    Hm. That's interesting. The RubyForge RSS feeds get polled every
    half hour by a couple folks, i.e.:
    [tom@rubyforge httpd]$ tail -10000 access_log | grep "16/Dec" | grep export |
    grep 66.68 | wc -l
    19
    [tom@rubyforge httpd]$
    Hasn't caused problems yet, but maybe that's because RubyForge only gets about
    30K-40K hits per day, and the feeds get just a fraction of that.
    --
    The Army reading list
  2. Neat idea. by grub · · Score: 5, Interesting


    This could be carried further into a whole indymedia via BT. It would be even harder for governments and industry to silent dissident voices.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  3. BitTorrent is no-go for small files.. by dk.r*nger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    BitTorrent doesn't scale for very small downloads (less than a few MB, I'd say), due to the tracker.

    The tracker keeps, well, uhm, track, of the available pieces of the file, and every client reports in every time has got, or failed to get, a piece. So, using BitTorrent to distribute RSS feeds won't work, because the tracker will take up as much bandwidth, if not more, as a HTTP request, resulting in the "Not changed since your version" request.

    Apart from that, well, yes, BitTorrent is great to distribute large files :)

  4. why not nntp for syndication? by ph00dz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I always thought that syndicators should take advantage of the current distributed architecture of the newsgroups to syndicate their content... but hey, maybe that's just me. The only real problem is one of authentication -- since you're downloading content from a publicly accessible source one would have to come up with some clever way of making sure you're grabbing content from the author you choose.

  5. IRC by Bluelive · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Using rss polling seems to me just a way to fake a subscribe push technology. Why not just use a push technology like irc. A channel per tracker, just join a channel to get the updates when they are send. Youd probably still want to use rss for events that youd miss while not online for longer periods.

  6. fidonet by mabu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A good analogy would be comparing the setup to Fidonet and their "echo" messageboards. It's a very efficient method to distribute news.

    The key to usefulness however, is enabling technology to prioritize and authenticate the RSS feeds in some way.

  7. Content management system ? by mybecq · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Can somebody explain how RSS and BitTorrent equal a content management system ?

    Sounds more like a (possibly improved) content delivery system.

    Too bad the article didn't indicate anything about content management.