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RSS And BitTorrent, Together At Last
eoyount writes "Wired has an interesting story about a really simple idea I wish I had thought of. Transferring large files across the Internet isn't easy for your average joe, but a combination of RSS and BitTorrent technology might just make it easier - Slashdot ran a previous story on the theoretical blending last year." (LegalTorrents is run by the strangely familiar simoniker, who wrote a short piece on the O'Reilly Network about how it was set up, and offers observations on how well the combination fares.) Update: 03/17 21:45 GMT by T : Ernest Miller submits two related postings he's written on RSS+BitTorrent, a combination he calls "broadcatching."
I've been writing extensively on Corante about RSS + BitTorrent, which I call "Broadcatching" here: Broadcatching Archives See, for example, RSS + BitTorrent Roundup - Broadcatching Isn't MS Active Channels and First Broadcatching App Available! (And Related News).
BitTorrent is basically another p2p service, except it's different (yes, i'm trying to be very specific here)
It allows for people to take advantage of bandwith by downloding bits of a large file from different users hosting a 'torrent.' At the end, all these pieces are put together. Yes, it is pretty good.
The problem with bittorrent is that a lot of users disconnect as soon as their download is finished. Won't this be an even bigger problem with game downloads (specifically multiplayer games) since even if the users knows they should stay connected afterwards, they might not since it would lag their game?
RSS feeds are an easy way to move news from site to site. For example, here is Slashdot's RSS feed
You can find more information here
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No new browser protocol is needed.
The technology is already available at http://freecache.org/ [from the peeps @ archive.org]
I don't why many others have jumped on the bandwagon yet.
RSS is "Really Simple Syndication" and it's best thought of as a spinoff to XML. It's a language under which blog-type news-channels can publish their content using, and then the user can use an RSS client that can group stories together into whatever sequence the user wants to see.
It's also seen as a effective way to replace e-mail mailing lists. Instead of getting your newsletters in your e-mail client, open them up in your RSS client which works on a pull basis rather than a push basis, but can still present the content to the user just like an e-mail program might.
It's very different than Active Desktop... that was just the idea of letting IE browser windows be part of the Windows Desktop level so that users could have a frequently-refreshed mini-page of content on their desktop.
Wow! You're right, with one smallish exception:
Please note that you cannot submit a whole site to FreeCache as in http://freecache.org/http://www.rocklobsters.com/ This will not work as only index.html will be cached. You have to prefix every item that you want to have cached seperately.
Using the last THG article as an example, either the Slashdot story would need to point to each page individually via freecache redirection or Tom's Hardware would need to do it.
Not quite as transparent as incorporating BitTorrent into the browser.
Unfortunately, one assumption at the beginning, that the cascading model is best-case performance for BitTorrent, is completely wrong. It's actually worst-case performance.
A scattered model gives BT as taking O(log(number of people)/(number of chunks) + 1) time for everyone to download the whole file instead of O(sqrt(number people)) as claimed in the article.
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