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RSS & BT Together?

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.

3 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. 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,
  2. 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 :)

  3. 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.