BlogTorrent Update
Saturday, February 19th, 2005 at 12:35 pmBlogtorrent (a coding project of Downhill Battle) has just been updated to include Mac and mySQL support. If you post music to a weblog (or just post music) this looks like an ideal, easy way to distribute the bandwidth.
To be honest I’m not sure how this relates to the P2P-based Magnet Protocol which I can tell you, using Bitzi Bitcollider, took about a minute to apply to every upload on CC Mixter. I think these two things have the same goal using different means. Magnet is supposed to be “application neutral” but doesn’t seem include BitTorrent in their list of supported applications. (If some one out there actually knows about this feel free to pipe in.)
At some point I’m going to be updating my fourstones catalog to use at least one of these so at that point I’ll report back what I find out.
April 1st, 2005 at 2:32 pm
Magnet links and BitTorrent can be used similarly. The former is far more flexible, the latter just does swarming download, really well. Even if you didn’t know, you could guess which one was more popular. :-)
Magnet links can be used to drive a poor swarming download if one (or more) regular http source is given for the ‘xs’ (exact substitute) parameter (a hash is usually given as the ‘xt’ or exact topic value) — poor because the http source is dumb — it doesn’t know anything about the swarm. Or they can be used to drive a decent swarming download, if the http source is a gnutella client, which will track and propagate ‘alt-sources’, i.e., participants in the swarm.
The way Magnet links are used so far are as an adjunct to filesharing (mainly with gnutella clients and kazaa), with the main benefit to publishers being seeding those networks. The main benefit for publishers using BitTorrent is reducting bandwidth costs.
BTW a probably slightly cleaned up version of the bitcollider PHP wrapper code[1] used on ccmixter.org and my attempted explanation of how BT differs from and mostly works better than stereotypical filesharing[2].
[1] http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2005/03/05/bitcollider-php/
[2] http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2004/12/30/deployment-matters/