Blog Torrent Beta Released

chatooya writes "Downhill Battle has released the first public preview of Blog Torrent a "simplified" BitTorrent package that they developed because, "Making it easy to blog large video files means that people can share their home movies the same way they share their photos or writings." Features include: integrated torrent creation and upload, simple non-MySQL installation, and an RSS feed for every tracker. Currently Windows only on the client side, but Mac and Linux versions are in the works."

Comments

sounds like a cool idea but

[Ckwop]

Would you host a torrent for someone else's blog? I dunno, sharing a torrent for a music album or a linux distro is a bit different to someones home movie.

I'd love to see it take off but I'm yet to be convinced.

Simon.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[jacksonj04]

I had the same thought - the BitTorrent ideal is that lots of people share the same file. The chances of readerships for blogs with videos (mainly ones read rarely) neing large enough for this to work is slim to none. Especially since the chances of everybody being online at once are even more remote.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Champaign]

I probably wouldn't, but I'd certain be willing (forced) to share with others AS I downloaded it. This would certainly be useful.

Plus it lets the blog owner use their home connection bandwidth instead of their blog/server bandwidth...

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[lightknight]

Dear God, no.

Look, blogs (weblogs) suck ass. Their only use is to stroke the egos of a bunch of narcissistic losers ("A webpage about me! YAAAAAAAY! Let's tell the entire world about me, because they care. I'm such a wonderful person, let me give you 100000 reasons why! And then I can tell you about my day!").

Blogs fuck up Google. I get 100 irrelevant hits from blogs, and about 10 relevant hits. They just increase the noise to signal ratio. It's like spam, just make it stop!

And now, you want to ruin Bit Torrent by making it easy for bloggers to use it? WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!?!

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The chances of readerships for blogs with videos (mainly ones read rarely) neing large enough for this to work is slim to none.

Just wait till Natalie Portman or Jenifer Lopez start video-P2P-blogging and you'll see the readership increase quite a bit.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Horse Rotorvator JAD]

I probably wouldn't, but I'd certain be willing (forced) to share with others AS I downloaded it.
Actually that is one of the few real problems that I've noticed with bit torrent. People share while downloading the torrent but then once they have it they stop sharing. The result is that for really big torrents you often end up downloading like 90% of the torrent and then you are screwed because there is no one sharing the last part of it.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Anonymous Coward]

You would bit torrent someone's video for the same reason you're reading their blog. They have something that interests you and others.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's rarely downloaded, then you can probably provide the bandwidth yourself without excessive cost. If it suddenly gets linked to by, say, Slashdot and a million people try to downloaded it all of a sudden, then BT to the rescue. Seems like a perfect solution to me.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Zorilla]

Error downloading hot-grits.mpeg: unable to connect to tracker

Damn...

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf, mods? This is fucking +5 insight-fucking-ful.

Clue has just left the building. I repeat, clue has just left the building.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Anonymous Coward]

surely this will mostly be used for illegal activity - just make it more accessible to those less technically minded?

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[ZorinLynx]

Blame the assymetry of most high speed connections. For instance, I have a whole 3 megabits downstream, but only 384Kbps upstream. This means that if I get even half my connection speed downloading a torrent, my ratio will still be pathetic.

Sure, you can let torrents seed for a while, and I frequently do. But a 3 or 4GB torrent has to seed for days before even coming close to a 1:1 ratio.

I wish residential connections weren't so assymetrical. BitTorrent would be amazing if everyone had 3000/1000 or even 1500/1500 connections.

-Z

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[realdpk]

Worse yet, due to the assyemtry, if you let BitTorrent use that full 384Kbps upstream, all other Internet use will be abysmally slow. So you're best off capping it at half that, or so.

A good compromise would be for the cable companies to uncap inter-customer connections, and keep the cap on for anything that goes to the Internet. Probably too expensive tho.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[realdpk]

Not quite +5. He thinks that this will, somehow, ruin BitTorrent? Maybe +3 Reactionary?

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Champaign]

All you need is for the original seeder to be responsible for their torrents (keep seeding) and this is avoided. And that would certainly be the case if someone was distributing media through their blog/website. If they can't be bothered to keep seeding it, why are they trying to distribute it in the first place?

What I think would be useful would be a super easy way to seed a bunch of torrents at once, and throttle the bandwidth on them, so you could provide a tiny trickle to many different torrents and prevent exactly the starvation you're talking about. This is probably already available but I haven't seen a client that does it.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 ironic is more appropriate. His internet ego is so pumped that he is now the universal authority on what sucks and what doesn't.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[stratjakt]

We all have linux based routers/gateways at home and we all do traffic shaping on our egress traffic, so no slowdowns whatsoever.

Well, those of us who actually walk the walk do.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[timeOday]

Worse yet, due to the assyemtry, if you let BitTorrent use that full 384Kbps upstream, all other Internet use will be abysmally slow. So you're best off capping it at half that, or so.

You can get around that, at least on Linux, using LARTC. I have set up my box so "miscellaneous" packets (p2p, email, etc) are only sent if there are NO ssh or web browsing packets ready to go (script). There may be a few remnants of wondershaper in there, but I think mine is better :)

It does work. With this in place the effect of running BitTorrent (or whatever) in the background is tiny.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Anonymous Coward]

you all are soooo eleeeeeeet

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[lightknight]

Think about it.

The last person to say "He thinks that this will, somehow, ruin X?" was the same guy who thought that giving USENET access to AOL users was a good idea. Technology in the hands of the masses (yes, I know I sound somewhat elitist) is not necessarily a good thing. Further proof? The kids in the back of the movie theatre who shine their laser pointers during the movie.

Granted, Bit Torrent is a tad more difficult to mess up (they need a tracker, and unpopular files tend to die), but I can see the day (probably next Wednesday, at this rate), where you are searching for "slackware iso" and find a thousand (dead) torrents for totally unrelated files. I can't think of how they can munge the above search (slackware), but then I'm not feeling particulary creative right now.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Zen Punk]

You mean in-fucking-sightful.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Adolph_Hitler]

Slashdot could use this.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[realdpk]

The USENET and movie examples are somewhat different however, in that with both you have the washed and unwashed masses together in one "room" (heh). With BitTorrent there are no rooms, every BitTorrent installation is independant, so one person throwing up a BT of their home videos (porn, likely) doesn't detract from someone else using it to grab ISOs.

On the other point, I guess I haven't had to search for torrents before. If it's something that the server operators would benefit from having a torrent, it's something announced somewhere big like Slashdot. Otherwise you're just downloading the whole file from them anyways, typically.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Taladar]

Popular blogs would have an advantage here and for unpopular ones the one original Bittorrent Seed would be enough and not much worse than hosting it on Webspace.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[legirons]

Again, Konspire2B is designed for this sort of thing, and has been stable for ages. Create a channel (by posting a public key) and broadcast on that channel. Anyone subscribed to your channel will receive the file and help-out with the distribution. Text, images, video, anything that's a file will work, and if you leave it running, it'll pick-up everything on the channels you're subscribed to.

Re:sounds like a cool idea but

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, I don't do that blog garbage anyway.....so it really would be a waste of MY hard drive space........

How can this work on a small scale?

[Fluidic Binary]

If bittorrent works off many users sharing bandwidth at once, I fail to see how this would help most blogs that don't have huge readerships.

Any retorts?

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, theoretically the overhead of bittorrent is not much higher than that of simply running an FTP server (assuming the tracker server is also seeding the file, which would be necessary in this situation). So, if only one person is downloading the file, then it would be better to just run an FTP server. but, as soon as a second person joins the torrent, the first person starts uploading to them, offloading some of the bandwidth burden from the tracker server.

pretty simple

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[HyperChicken]

I think two people on at the same time isn't likely for home movies type of things. And I doubt that the average Windows user would bother leaving BitTorrent running after the file is downloaded.

This idea is flawed.

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[jerometremblay]

What if it IS likely that two people will be there at the same time? If I post yesterday's party videos, I potentially have as many downloads as there were people.

Unless of course you always film yourself alone.

The idea is not flawed.

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[hackstraw]

If bittorrent works off many users sharing bandwidth at once, I fail to see how this would help most blogs that don't have huge readerships.

But without p2p, you would have to upload the whole file to a server, tell your friends and family where the file can be downloaded. Which means that you would have server space with very generous bandwidth limits, etc, etc.

With a torrent, you create the torrent, register it with a tracker, and post on your blog or in an email, and you never have to think about it, nor would you have to wait for the upload to finish first before telling your friends & family.

This rocks.

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[TrevorB]

Sometimes images become shared between thousands of blog users as the meme of the week.

For instance, this link has been making the rounds last week:

http://img40.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img40=feuerfreimo vi e.swf

You could easily find that link on a thousand LiveJournals. It's not quite slashdotting, but files often get locked out because they're shared on bandwidth limited servers.

So don't think home movies. Think shared movies. Not the MPAA DivX kind, but more like weebls stuff or mpeg clips of turkeys attacking George Bush's crotch or something... The kind of thing that's embedded in a page.

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[Frogbert]

Yes because no blogs get a large readership that would be interested in having a video section.

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[Soulfarmer]

Ever heard of dead torrents?

Never have to think about it? Right, like people would seed that more than a week or so...

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[Taladar]

The Torrent can not die before the last user stops sharing and that would be the blogger.

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[AtlanticGiraffe]

Imagine a blog hosted at home, and the owner posts a home-made movie.

Before Torrent: Little traffic means nothing to worry about. Lots of traffic (link from some big site) means the movie has to go.

Using Torrent: Little traffic still means nothing to worry about. Lots of traffic makes the problem even smaller, as you suddenly and automatically have thousands of mirrors.

Re:How can this work on a small scale?

[a8o]

Interesting, except I don't believe many people would stick around to seed. THe great thing about http for me is that it's more like casual sex than a long term relationship.

Is it really easy enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you compare it to something like Dijjer, which requires zero effort to publish content, while it might be easier than BitTorrent - is it easy enough?

Re:Is it really easy enough?

[AIX-Hood]

Yeah but it was proved last week that Dijjer keeps files transfering through your machine that you never intended to have happen. This deceitful and a nightmare for network admins.

Re:Is it really easy enough?

[holmes wilson]

Holmes here from Downhill Battle

I think this previous post covers our thinking on the subject pretty well.

When it comes to really large files, uploading them from a home computer to a webserver is no picnic. Most people don't have more than 500MB on their web hosting account. And uploading really large files in a web form is really flakey--there's no status bar, etc. Also, if your original file is on a home computer with a cable modem, just getting the file uploaded could take a couple days. In the meantime, Bittorrent would have spread a large part of that file around to several peers, and people could have begun downloading it.

For a large organization with a large server, Dijjer could be a better bet. But for a blogger with not-much-web-space and a cable modem, we think Blogtorrent will be easier to use.

Holmes Wilson

Downhill Battle

Re:Is it really easy enough?

[Sanity]

Yeah but it was proved last week that Dijjer keeps files transfering through your machine that you never intended to have happen. This deceitful and a nightmare for network admins.

Yeah, they are really trying to keep that quiet, which is why it is addressed by the first three questions in their FAQ. How very deceitful of them.

Re:Is it really easy enough?

[AIX-Hood]

The problem is that it doesn't tell the usually naive user at the time that it's doing it. It just does it in the background. Cablvision severely penalizes users who upload more than a few hours a day with painful bandwidth capping, reducing your upstream bandwidth by a 10x fold decrease. Apps like Dijjer operating in the background, moving around stuff that the user isn't aware of could have potentially damaging consequences for the user. Same goes for many other cable ISPs who penalize their customers with hefty fines if they go over their small monthly allotments.

New P2P app

[glrotate]

Suprnova.org is doing a beta of their own p2p app. keep an eye out.

Re:New P2P app

[Anonymous Coward]

That must be why I've not been able to get to their site for a few days... All I get is a bunch of redirects until some random numeric IP refuses connection.

Re:New P2P app

[TobyIRC]

Will it too feature annoying Vonage ads on the top, side, and bottom of the client?

Re:New P2P app

[Associate]

Comes up fine for me. Sure you don't have an adware or spyware infestation?

Application?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only real use of this, is of course for the amateur porn blogs. Then it's a killer app!

Re:Application?

[AmVidia HQ]

Shusssh! Let's not give them any ideas now.

Re:Application?

[FrYGuY101]

Oh?

Remind me to avoid the blogs you visit... I'm not into Snuff films...

Oh, you meant... ah. I see now.

Re:Application?

[CoAX]

As usual, the technology really kicks off when the pr0n industry starts using it.

Remember VCR? DVDs? internet?

just what i was looking for

[Anonymous Coward]

I made a bunch of home movies with my wife on my honeymoon, now i finally have a way to share with the world how lucky and well endowed i am!

Re:just what i was looking for

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see them! :-)

Heheh

[NetNinja]

He said "Home Movies" yeah Beavis, Heheheh

Yeah right.

I could check it myself, but

[empaler]

what features would it have? I'm using Shareaza atm and am very content with that. Can't see anything that would change that...

Re:I could check it myself, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, perhaps it will run on linux and osx. Those are two features Shareaza is missing.

Re:I could check it myself, but

[Mycroft_VIII]

I believe that is being corrected as we type. Shareaza was opensourced (GPL) as of version2.0 so it's just a matter of time and coder effort.

Mycroft

Why is this a "blog"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody else see this as a misuse of the word "blog"? Sounds like they just combined two buzzwords together (bittorrent and blog) in the hopes that it would increase the popularity of their product. And since it ended up on the front page of Slashdot, it appears to have worked.

Re:Why is this a "blog"?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Does anybody else see this as a misuse of the word "blog"? Sounds like they just combined two buzzwords together (bittorrent and blog)

Misuse of a misuse of a misuse of a made-up name. One of my family member is here behind me, looking at this /. article, asking me what the hell a blog-torrent is, and I'm about to tell her to sit down for a little while, whil I explain the concept of P2P and blogging, and bandwidth, and Slashdot to her. Oh dear...

Re:Why is this a "blog"?

[ricotest]

While I agree that it's a little contrived, the BlogTorrent software was designed for use in blogs first and foremost, so it's an appropriate name.

Re:Why is this a "blog"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it was originally named Battletorrent, which was less buzzwordy, but obviously more confrontational. We decided to rename it Blogtorrent not because it *was* a blog (although you could use it to have an all-video blog), but rather because it was *built for* blogs.

A site like waxy.org has waxy.org/bt. But that's too complicated for most people to set up on their own.

Holmes
DB

User mindset

[FrenZon]

An admirable work, congratulations to them. Though doesn't this sort of encourage users to think that it's right to download and run small executables in order to get to bigger files? We should probably be teaching users to be a bit more discerning about what they click 'Open' on.

I'm nitpicking, of course

Re:User mindset

[hooqqa]

...if only there was a way to run executables behind the scenes when you visit the blog so as not to overwhelm the average user.

Re:User mindset

[holmes wilson]

Hey, Holmes from Downhill Battle here.

We definitely thought about that, and other people have raised that concern. But here's how we view it:

First, the only person who gets an executable to download is a first time user. Once Blogtorrent is installed, the tracker detects that and just serves you up regular torrent files (or blogtorrent files for uploaders). So we aren't creating any habits here.

And considering the first time user, they fall into one of two camps. Either they're an experienced user who understands what's bad about running an executable from an untrusted website, or they're not.

If the former, they'll be happy to install Blogtorrent if the tracker is running on a site they trust, while if it's on "war3z d00d's p2p moviez page" they probably won't. And they won't have to. It will be enough to check out Blogtorrent.com and download it there.

And if the latter is true (our user doesn't know what's bad about running executables from shady sites) then their computer is probably already a petri dish of virii trojans, adware, and virii, or it will get that way soon. And the majority of such users would have a hard enough time wrapping their heads around how Bittorrent works that they'd just give up without the executable installer.

Deciding to *not* give these users an executable installer just means deciding (on their behalf) that they should continue their life in adware purgatory, but without that video clip or album they wanted. We wouldn't really be protecting anybody by not providing this feature.

And I know Bittorrent is pretty easy to install, but trust us, we've talked to so many people who have tried *so* hard to get it and failed miserably. With the executable, anybody who wants a file will end up getting it. And next time they're covered.

In other news...

[StarWreck]

In other news the proliferation of really cheezy home movies posted to personal Blogs has reached epic poportions. Tonight at 11...

Incorporate into /.

[cuteseal]

Perhaps they could incorporate it somehow (don't look at meef, I'm no techie) into slashdot posts -- slashdot certainly has a huge readership, and as soon as an article links to a site, it usually goes belly up.

Perhaps this could help alleviate the slashdot effect?

THTTP

[areve]

I've wondered about Torrent being an extension to to the http protocol for surfing the web. I wouldn't expect it to happen but if our web browser would just get data from the nearest node instead of the original site then the slashdot effect would be a positive one increasing your sites bandwidth not a negative one.

Re:THTTP

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

No need to extend the HTTP protocol. As it is now, BT is linked to your browser with the mime-type mechanism (i.e. ".torrent extension == launch Bittorrent and give it the file" sort of scheme). The only thing you need really is to get Bittorrent to tell the browser to display the downloaded HTML page(s).

Re:THTTP

[Doctor Crumb]

ugh. bittorrent is for big files. HTML pages are not big files. There are other, better solutions for HTTP, like HTTP proxies and coral. Bittorrent is the wrong hammer to be using for the http screw.

Re:THTTP

[mrchaotica]

I've been thinking that having the browser handle .torrent files transparently would be good. For example, I am considering making a Firefox extension where instead of downloading the torrent and then opening BitTorrent to deal with it, the Firefox download manager would handle it itself (unfortunately, I need to learn both how Firefox extensions work and how BitTorrent works, so it'll take a while).

Re:THTTP

[MikeBabcock]

No offence, but its way too high in latency.

I click and receive a website in under a second in many cases (10Mbit feed at home). BitTorrent takes over a second just to figure out what peers are out there, not including beginning a download.

There are smart ways to spread copies of small amounts of data around for faster access; BitTorrent isn't one of them.

Re:THTTP

[kryptkpr]

This has been brought up *so* many times on the BT mailing list, and always get shot down.

BT swarms are optmized for large amounts of static content... they are terrible for small amounts of dynamic data (ie, websites).

That really depends...

[Senjutsu]

on just what kind of home movies we're talking about, doesn't it? *Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge, Nod Suggestively*

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Now non-Mysql has become a feature? Just some years ago every project bragged about supporting MySQL! ;)

Re:LOL

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Supporting MySQL is great. Requiring MySQL sucks, as most users don't have it installed, let alone configured, and automated install scripts are notoriously good at messing up complex servers' config files anyway...

Re:LOL

[holmes wilson]

And as far as the MySQL support goes, that's definitely coming. We want to integrate Blogtorrent with the Drupal/Civicspace CMS real soon, and part of that will be rewriting it to use a database instead of flat files.

Holmes
Downhill Battle

Ideal for podcasting

[brdweb]

Adam Curry and Dave Winer have already been thinking about ways to better integrate bittorrent into some rss readers and blog tools. It's not hosting your blog itself, but rather your podcast or show which takes up the vast majority of available bandwidth. This allows the 'small guy' that has talent to compete with some of the big broadcasters out there. At least on the 'net.

Bit Torrent? Goodbye .edu!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a great way for startup blogs to loose the big collegiate market. Most campuses block Bit Torrent these days.

Re:Bit Torrent? Goodbye .edu!

[Anonymous Coward]

no.. they block tracker sites or the default bittorrent ports.. the only way to block bittorrent completely would involve blocking every port.. which is silly obviously

Re:Bit Torrent? Goodbye .edu!

[AIX-Hood]

it's not nearly that hard. The bigger .edu's invest in a packeteer router which sees the bittorrent or other p2p packets after inspection, and either bandwidth limits them or drops them entirely.

Re:Bit Torrent? Goodbye .edu!

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah heaven forbid they have to use the network for school related studies now

You're an ass

[Anonymous Coward]

the ads on your website are annoying
stop trying to use slashdot to drive traffic to your shitty blog
that is all

PS: i hope you get colon cancer

Re:You're an ass

[Anonymous Coward]

How this AC's raving and ranting was modded +3:Informative is beyond me. Sounds more like -1:Flamebait to me.

Re:You're an ass

[Anonymous Coward]

No, sounds about right, given the circumstances.

Not much use

[temojen]

Bittorrent is good for large (hundreds of MB->tens of GB) files accessed by hundreds or thousands of users. Most slashdotted sites are serving web pages (tens of KB) to hundreds of thousands of people. Also, the sites that fall quickest seem to be the ones that serve dynamic pages, which can't be torrented.

Blogtorrent probably won't be much use for most people as Bittorrent is not so good when there's only a handful of downloaders. Most people's blogs just aren't that interesting. It would be handy for things like the Jedi kid, or some amateur journalist who was at the right place at the right time, with a camera.

Re:Not much use

[WhiteDragon]

I am sure this is becomming a standard slashdot comment now, but instead of posting torrents (although for large files, they should), they should use coral cache (append .nyud.net:8090 to the host name)

actually, I think there is even a bookmaklet to do this automatically. *googles* Yep, here it is:
Coral Cache Bookmarklet

I don't know...

[Eric Damron]

"...I dunno, sharing a torrent for a music album or a linux distro is a bit different to someones home movie."

Well I guess that depends on the type of "home movie" **cough** doesn't it...

news?

[Anonymous Coward]

how is this different from phptracker or the other web based tracking scripts and programs?

Dude!

[Anonymous Coward]

Roland Pimpmysiteaquaille's suspiciously regular front pages may indeed be annoying, but wishing he had colon cancer? That ain't right.

Amateur Porn

[colmore]

This is going to be used for amateur porn right? As I understand it BitTorrent needs simultaneous downloads to really function, and who has home movies that a whole lot of people really want to watch?

Oh yeah, naked people.

Re:Amateur Porn

[NiTr|c]

The comment is modded funny, but it's so very true. Sad enough as it is, internet porn as a whole pioneers a lot of new (not saying good or bad) ideas.

If you build it, you can bet it will be used for porn. This new tool is certainly no exception to the rule.

Evolution...

[Duncan3]

First we had web pages about peoples cats...

Then came blogs about peoples cats...

Now we have videos about peoples cats...

And still, NOONE CARES! Seriously.

Re:Evolution...

[Iron Clad Burrito]

So sayeth a guy with his own website.

Blogs are no different from what you have up ("I like shakespeare, I'm a geek, here's stull I think is funny..."). The ONLY difference is that bloggers use software.

Basically, if you have a webpage with info about you, you can't say squat about weblogs.

Re:Evolution...

[Rolman]

Well, if they're sites about people and cats that look like this, then I'm all for evolution.

Re:Evolution...

[rasz]

>Well, if they're sites about people and cats that
>look like this, then I'm all for evolution.

Those "girls" are BUTT UGLY. And I mean ugly in "I wouldnt fok that one if I was blind" way.
Seriously, what is wrong witth you ? Are you from England, Australia or Utah or something ?
I be that this is your favourite one :
http://www.littlegrayguy.com/lgg/images/page052/fr ont/rebecca_052f.jpg
or this one
http://www.littlegrayguy.com/lgg/images/page003/fr ont/Img_7749f.jpg
or this
http://www.littlegrayguy.com/lgg/images/page032/fr ont/star02f.jpg
http://www.littlegrayguy.com/lgg/images/page064/fr ont/tuesdae_068f.jpg
http://www.littlegrayguy.com/lgg/images/page055/fr ont/elise_068f.jpg
http://www.littlegrayguy.com/lgg/images/page030/fr ont/IMG_7326f.jpg


They look so post nuclear I want to puke.

Re:Evolution...

[bonius_rex]

And still, NOONE CARES! Seriously.
Not true. My cat has his own blog, and 2 of my readers (ok, so it's just my mom and my sister) are constantly emailing me for updates/pictures, etc.

That the purpose (for me anyhow) of the blog. It's for friends/family who are wondering "Gee, I wonder what Bone is up to?" to have a place to get that question answered.

Re:Evolution...

[Freaek]

NOT WORK SAFE!

How they are called?

[gmuslera]

Video Blog = Vlog? Already saw Blikis (Blog+Wiki) and other extrange mix between words, so, there is an standard, compressed way to name them?

Re:How they are called?

[citizenkeller]

It appears so, yes...
Of course, you could also go with bitlog, torog, blorrent, ...

Re:How they are called?

[elFarto the 2nd]

Yep, there's one word to describe them all, crap.

Regards
elFarto

Screws up already installed clients

[TobyIRC]

They like to state that "most people don't have a client installed", so their blog torrent installs the original BT, lets it steal all .torrent associations, and then uses it's installation to download the file. This will screw up all your associations if you already have it, and their plan does NOT include seperately hosting the .torrent for those of us who have a favorite. Thanks, merry bloggers, you've been retarded yet again.

Oh yeah, and I love your site, downhillbattle? You want to spread awareness about DMCA abusage yet prefer to do it through clothes than provide ANY buttons, thus killing your one market, the geeks who are actually worried about this stuff. Ineffectuality, you have a new poster child.

Re:Screws up already installed clients

[katsushiro]

Okay, I know you're trolling, but I'll bite, simply because it really sucks when people make completely false statements about something they know nothing about and then no one calls them on it:

If you'd bothered to actually take a look at the 'BlogTorrent' thing (I hate the name, by the way, but what can you do?), you'd see that it *DOES* include separately hosting the .torrent for those of us with a favorite Torrent client. In fact, since I actually have it installed on my server and have been trying it out, I can copy and paste the text on the page:

How do I download a file?

If you've never used BitTorrent before, just click on the "Easy Downloader" link next to the file you want. Open the Easy Downloader (by clicking "open" in your browser, or by saving it to your Desktop and double clicking on it). That will install the Blog Torrent plugin and begin downloading the file you want. Note: if you already have a BitTorrent client installed, you do not need the Easy Downloader, just click on the .torrent file. (Emphasis added)

Re:Screws up already installed clients

[TobyIRC]

I wasn't trolling, that was my experience with the client. I was just 'demoing' it out and found out it was worthless. I'm not terribly interested in checking out the "full" version to "publish" them, especially because their website says this is pretty much the same as the downloaders version (see the section on the front page entitled "Why use Blog Torrent on your blog or website?").

Why not just learn from blizzard and use a technique like the blizzard downloader, an all in one stand-alone exe which doens't need installation and does its job well?

Re:Screws up already installed clients

[katsushiro]

Actually, I went and looked at the demo on their site right now and it's the same one I've got on my site, there's a column with a link to the .torrent file itself right before the 'Easy Downloader' link, and the same text on the page.. maybe when you looked they still had an old version up.

Anyway, I do agree with you that it would be nice if they did something like the Blizzard Downloader that just downloads that one file and that's it, but I don't think that's what they're aiming for. It looks like they're trying to introduce bittorrent to the non-techies, people who probably don't have Bittorrent installed yet. If you've allready got a torrent client installed and download torrents all the time, you're not really the audience they're aiming for (although I do like how simple it is to upload a torrent to the system with it), and even then, you can just click on the .torrent link to download it with no problems. It's mainly aimed at the grandma and grandpa crowds by just letting them click once and have the bittorrent client download and start fetching their file without them having to know anything technical, figure out what Bittorrent is, or how it works. All they want to know is 'I clicked on the link and my file started downloading', that's really the audience they're going for.

That said, I dunno how succesful they'll be Bittorrent's great, but it's not all that simple all the time either. And since it mostly shines when you've got a couple dozen or hundred people downloading the same file, I don't know how much it can help the target audience who propbably has one or two people at most who would be interested in downloading their home movies.

Seeing as it's downhillbattle.org, and their main thing is the whole copyfight bit, I can see the Blogtorrent thing as much more useful for people like small bands who have a regular following, so they can distribute their records on MP3 for free without hosing their bandwith.. Small museums or performance artists.. you know, people who actually have soem material that people download allready. For Joe Blogger who just wants to put up videos of his cat, however, this system won't really help much, I think. I mean, I have a blog myself. I installed the system to check it out cause it looked interesting.. but I'm probably never gonna use it. I know my blog is read by like 4 people, and they're all my friends. If I need to show them something funny my cat's doing, I can always just IM them and point the webcam at the cat. :)

Blog!

[Lancaibheal]

Blog blog blog blog!

I suspect it won't be all that long before we start to see this term misapplied in non-computer related stories, instead of just computer-related stories. Can't you just imagine it?

• Vatican condemns blog abortion statistics
• Ukranian president in blog election scandal
• Australian cricket team wins the toss and elects to blog

On a more relevant note, it's a good idea in theory, but I doubt that I'd want to share much of my precious capped bandwidth to distribute the video of some bozo's holiday to Byron Bay.

woohoo!

[osmethnee]

But does anyone really think that getting users to download and run random binaries off the internet is a good thing? How are people supposed to be able to differentiate the "good" foo.torrent.exe offering (say) porn from the "bad" dialer.exe which also offers porn?

And why did the project think that having users install new software from a different web-site every time they feel like watching a video was a better solution than creating a clear and fool-proof BT client which only needs to be downloaded once, and that can be from a trustworthy source?

Re:woohoo!

[Tarential]

RTFA you moron. It shares movies, mp3s, software, etc etc. It doesn't make it any more likely for the user to install viruses because anyone running untrusted .exe files is going to run them whether they came from BitTorrent or they came through HTTP. People who do that are stupid.

Now that I think about it, so are you.

Running EXE files

[Clark_Kent]

As Holmes pointed out, we've already thought about this issue, and I think we've come up with the most reasonable solution possible. This post explains it nicely:

To clear things up once and for all: End users only need to download an installer for Blog Torrent ONCE, just as they would for any other Bit Torrent client. After that, they just download torrents. When it comes down to it, any software that's going to be doing downloading will need permission to access the local machine. The best way we can deal with this is make the user deal with the permissions issue as few times as possible in a way that they are familiar with. Giving people an EXE installer once seems to be the best way to achieve this on Windows.

Upload ports?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone please tell me how in the world this thing uploads? BT has to have ports open in order to upload. If joe user is behind a decent firewall, how the heck is his 'share' gonna get out? I know I had to specifically open ports for my BT shares. hmm?

Future

[MrDoh!]

OMG! All the rants against this, it's a HUGE step forward.
Really, come one, we're going to have a technology that allows HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of video feeds, with the ability to easily search for streams playing (using RSS), with the ability to handle popular feeds to scale up (albeit, we'll see how it works, but I think it'll happen).
We've all moaned about the lack of quality on TV, and although it'll start poor quality, it'll get better! This is a Tivo for us all!

Re:Future

[drDugan]

I have to agree. the world will end up in the hands of the little people as long as information can flow freely. watch the monetary system. watch the revolution. we are in the middle of something as big as the fall of communism with the information stuff. I give it 4 years and all fucking hell with break loose with politics as people realize we don't need the governement any more. oh yeah -- and tin foil hats for EVERYONE!

Oh dear,

[Anonymous Coward]

oh deary me - RFID? Tin foil stocks are going up, up, up!

That wasn't Roland

[sbszine]

That was a troll, not the real Roland. The real Roland is rpiquepa -- check the accepted submissions.

nothing compared to...

[Anonymous Coward]

ZOOM Media Gallery

many bloggers are already using it to share home movies and depending on your server it may make thumbnails of the video as well.

http://ummagumma.nl/mikedeboer/

Killakid

[MacFury]

Sometimes images become shared between thousands of blog users as the meme of the week.

My stupid video at Killakid.com got posted on a couple hundred blogs somehow. Next thing I know I pushed 60GB of traffic through my site in 2 days.

Re:Killakid

[SEWilco]

My stupid video at Killakid.com got posted on a couple hundred blogs somehow. Next thing I know I pushed 60GB of traffic through my site in 2 days.

Be sure to give us an update in 2 days.

Server resources?

[tom taylor]

I've been trying to find out information about what kind of RAM/CPU usage a Bittorrent tracker can expect. Based on say... 10 seeds, 100 peers.

Anyone know?

Not automatically seeding?

[silence535]

Somehow I must have misunderstood what BlogTorrent does. I briefly tried it and found, that the file is not uploaded to the BlogTorrent site.

The BlogTorrent itself is not seeding.
So I have to keep my local machine running.

BT developers, please consider BT to store the file on the server and seed it automatically.

Yes of course, then you have to have lots of webspace and others might swamp your precious space, but then you can blog and turn your local machine off.
Make it optional...

-silence

Arg!.. People dont get it

[BeCre8iv]

DownhillBattle are about enableing artist to distribute their own music.

They thought 'this blog thing would be useful for posting songs' (musos not being the geekyest of types)

But hosting would cost too much. so they thought 'bittorret would share the load' bit it was complex and time-consuming (musos not being the geekyest of types)

So they thought 'we could combine the two - lets call it blogTorrent'

It was slasdotted and people cried 'Vapourware' so they released something and people complain about 'buzzwords'

This is the solution to a problem (the music industry) so I think 'STFU and RTFA'

blogger as the only seeder..

[Soulfarmer]

Kinda nullifies the idea of shared bandwidth supplying doesn't it?

IHBT, IHL

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for the tip, i'll be sure to let the real roland have it next time

Different variant could really help

[MCRocker]

Other posters have shown how this idea has problems, but I have a slightly different suggestion that has most of the same advantages as BitTorrent and would be more appropriate for typical web content.

Basically, set up the browsers to share the cached data.

A typical transaction life cycle would be to send an HTTP request to a server, but instead of getting back the actual document content, your browser gets back a short list of the last n clients to ask for the document. Your browser then requests the documents from the most recent client to get the file and that client returns the file if it is still in the cache. If it's not in the cache, or the client is no longer connected, then the browser moves on to the next client in the list. If none of them have the document, then the browser will go back to the server and request the document providing a list of clients that no longer have the content available so the server can keep it's list up-to-date. To prevent any tampering, the content documents would be signed by the original host and the client would have to request the public key directly from the original host. Any time a document is updated, the server will have to provide the actual document to the next few requesting clients and rebuild it's list of clients from scratch.

This would really reduce the load on servers by using sharing in a way that is similar to BitTorrent, but would be much more appropriate for the small file sizes that are typical of web documents and be able to work in a public way that doesn't require proxy caches.