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Bittorrent-casting? (RSS + Torrent + Osprey)

I had an idea while reading Dave Winer’s 2001 notes about adding a payload to RSS. Podcasting came about because there needed to be a little more than a payload in RSS, but you had to have that first. Now you can hook the RSS payload into a number of enhanced aggregators like ipodderX and much is made seamless.
We saw that BitTorrent has some pretty big missing gaps and aimed to address several by creating Osprey to add permaseed and managable and searchable and distributable metadata to the BitTorrent bag of tricks.
So far so good. Now if the payload for an RSS subscription were to be the the B/T Download link, we’d have a nice B/T software release service (to think of one use). John says that we already “plan to generate several rss feeds in osprey,
the first batch of which will correspond to the 3 blocks on
http://torrent.ibiblio.org.
Hmmmm.

2 Comments

  1. Paul Jones

    Dave Winer writes to say that the item tag on rss now includes a bittorrent definition (as of November 04). So we’re even closer than we thought. Osprey could build RSS and an aggregator could then use bitTorrent as described.

  2. thomas

    I have several utilities at my site about this… Check out the archives at WritTorrent.sf.net !!!

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