August 30, 2004
Grumet: BitTorrent and RSS 2.0

From the Technology at Harvard Law site:

Experimenting with BitTorrent and RSS 2.0

Build an RSS feed with one item per .torrent file. Add an enclosure sub-element of item, that looks like this

<enclosure url="http://www.legaltorrents.com/bit/thinner-archives-vol-1.zip.torrent" length="25876" type="application/x-bittorrent"/>

Key point: the length field specifies the size of the .torrent, not the size of the BMO (Big Media Object).

What makes this interesting

First, RSS and BitTorrent complement each other naturally. RSS was designed to report freshly available content, which is exactly where BitTorrent shines. RSS 2.0 enclosures were designed to automate the download process that BitTorrent optimizes.

Second, combining the two should reduce the barrier to entry for small broadcasters. While not a new idea, video blogging has always borne a bandwidth cost. Combining BitTorrent's cost savings with widely available RSS emitting tools should, for example, make it possible for a small group of motivated people across the world to create their own news channel.

Posted by Dave at August 30, 2004 06:50 PM