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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.

5 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. Konspire2b by Dooferlad · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  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. Use conditional GET, not HEAD by NonaMyous · · Score: 5, Informative
    An even better behaved program will use conditional GET instead of HEAD. For more info, see HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers :
    The people who invented HTTP came up with something even better. HTTP allows you to say to a server in a single query: "If this document has changed since I last looked at it, give me the new version. If it hasn't just tell me it hasn't changed and give me nothing." This mechanism is called "Conditional GET", and it would reduce 90% of those significant 24,000 byte queries into really trivial 200 byte queries.