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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.
Hm. That's interesting. The RubyForge RSS feeds get polled every
half hour by a couple folks, i.e.: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
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,
...practical ways. It's a nice program, I've used it on occasssion but it does have its share of bugs.
And setting up a server isn't quite easy.
It really could be a lot better with some work.
clifgriffin > blog
I'll believe it when I see it. This idea has been circulating the last few days through the blog world, the same people who think they're going to crush traditional media with the sheer power of their blogs. I say whatever.
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
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
Konspire2b looks like a better option than BitTorrent for distributing news. You could have a channel mapping to an RSS feed and just wait for the news to come to you. No polling intervals and low bandwidth requirements for the operator. With BitTorrent you still have to poll for updates and this removes that requirement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the first time I've heard FidoNet mentioned in... must be almost a decade. It's like the huge amateur network (which for a brief period outnumbered the Internet in raw node count, mind you) never existed.
:-/
:-)
Anyway, FidoNet was not without its share of problems. The killing bullet, I'd say today, was the social factor - there were too conservative forces clinging to backwards compatibility at the cost of anything. Anything had to work with the most basic piece of software; this effectively shot progress and evolution dead.
Not that there weren't attempts. There were. They just weren't successful.
Anyway, setting up echoes would have the same problems as FidoNet echoes. The number one problem was typical for Slashdot: DUPES!
Echoes were set up so that one node relayed a message in an echomail forum to its other connected nodes for a particular echo, effectively creating a star topology, different for each forum. However, since each sysop just wanted the echo linked, he would just hook up to somewhere, and forget about it. Then, others would hook up from him, and all of a sudden somebody had hooked up to two different valid uplinks.
The result? The star topology all of a sudden had a loop in it. Messages would keep circling (since FidoNet used dedicated dialup lines, latency between nodes was typically in the hours range) and dupe filters were created.
All of those filters and filter-enabling tags were optional, of course. After all, you couldn't mandate an operational node to change its behavior, you could just ask nicely.
Political play to no ends.
Anyway, there were many other funny effects with EchoMail. Crosslinking was another - when one echo got linked to another at a node, so that all messages in echo X would enter echo Y at that node and vice versa. The most exotic of these was when a religious echo got crosslinked with a fantasy humor one -- through crosslinked physical directories at a node (the FAT pointers for the different directories hosting the two echoes pointed to the same location on the disk). Anyway, much hilarious discussion ensued, and not many understood much what people were trying to say in the crosslinked echo.
/ former sysop and NEC in FidoNet