Check out BlogTorrent. The premise of this project put together by the folks at Downhill Battle is to greatly simplify torrenting for the average Joe. Not only does it allow you to torrent something by just picking a file to upload, but it also wraps it up with a torrent enabled RSS feed. The cool upload feature is currently Windows only, but the concept is very promising. In fact, I've been tinkering lately with a similar idea myself. It's an idea whose time has come.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:05 PM in enabled feeds | Comments (0)  

The ultimate in self-referentialism. Here's a blog entry about a videoblog from bloggercon III as seen at Momentshowing. It gets better. You can see me in the video bringing up electronic voting. So then I thought if self-referentialism is actually a word and found this page from google. And then it occurred to me that the only self referential thing to do was to link to it.

As Kirk Herbstreit would say, it is what it is.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:03 PM in general | Comments (0)  

Just finished my interview about bit torrent with Joel Rose of NPR. Keep your eyes peeled next week (or your ears), for a 7 minutes piece on bit torrent either during Morning Edition or All Things Considered on Tuesday or Wednesday. I think I may have been a little nervous and amongst the various perspectives he's including in the story, hopefully I'll get included. We shall see (or hear).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:09 PM in general | Comments (0)  

I got a call from NPR today and it looks like I'll be recording an interview with them about bit torrent and Torrentocracy this Friday. I'm not sure how or when it will be used, but the real question is whether they'll let me torrent the interview...

By Gary Lerhaupt, 03:21 PM in general | Comments (0)  

A couple weeks back, I wrote about Phil Lesh sitting in at an Umphrey's McGee concert I was at. Quickly afterwards, a couple of short video clips popped up, but soon disappeared. I managed to snag them and have now set up a torrent (if the Umprheys people would prefer I not host this video, please get in touch and I'll take this down).

It's about a minute of total video which isn't all that much, but still cool just to see. The real reason I'm putting this up is that I was futzing around with creating torrents directly from Linux with btmakemetafile.py and wanted to make sure I've got everything set up right. Previously, I've been going through the extra hassle of making torrents using MakeTorrent in Windows, but when the files get large, transferring files to a windows machine just to spit out a torrent doesn't make sense.

Up until today, I couldn't get btmakemetafile.py to work correctly to create torrents, but it looks like this was caused by installing the Linux maketorrent-1.2.zip on top of the original bt python scripts. I went back to just the BitTorrent-3.4.2 source and no problems at all.

And for something completely random, here's a great picture from the same show which also happens to show my hands clapping in the bottom left corner. You might wonder how I know those are my hands, but trust me, I know my weird thumbs like .... well, like the back of my hand.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:18 PM in torrents | Comments (0)  

All rejoice, Firefox 1.0 has been released (they appear slashdotted at the moment). Travis Hardiman writes in to let us know of the Mozilla torrent tracker. In particular, for you Windows people, why directly slam Mozilla's bandwidth, when the following is available:

Firefox Setup 1.0.exe.torrent

Torrents for the tar.gz are also available for you saner Linux folk.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 06:55 AM in torrents | Comments (1)  

BloggerCon today was pretty cool. Blogging about it seems somewhat useless, so you can just go check out other's musings from feedster. One of the cool moments for me, though, was getting the whole podcasting phenomenon. I've sort of managed to ignore it as its popped up on Engadget and perhaps even the NYTimes, but seeing the passion and potential in the room, they must be on to something. Particularly interesting was the whole idea of Podcast "celebrities," who I guess like "A-list" bloggers seem to be developing quite the following.

More interesting to me, though, is how podcasting might scale past its infancy. If the whole point is for the average joe to start creating his own radio show (or whatever the hell you want to call it), and the whole point is to get a lot of people to download the mp3 of your show, then certainly bandwidth quickly becomes a concern (especially for the average joe). Enter bit torrent.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:00 PM in general | Comments (0)  

There's a Reuters story out today claiming that bit torrent makes up over 1/3rd of global internet traffic. This is all a prelude to the MPAA announcing that they are set to follow in the RIAA's footsteps and begin suing filesharers. I guess they've decided the success the music industry is having is worth imatating(10). Thankfully, the article also discusses the legal uses for bit torrent.

"Almost any software that makes it easy to swap copyrighted files is ripe for a crackdown BitTorrent's turn at bat will definitely happen," said Harvard University associate law professor Jonathan Zittrain. "At least under U.S. law, it's a bit more difficult to find the makers liable as long as the software is capable of being used for innocent uses, which I think (BitTorrent) surely is."

Included, even, is a mention of Torrentocracy (though I'm only hosting the presidential debate audio, not the video). It's nice to have that in my back pocket once the lawsuits start flying. Keep it legal, keep it clean and you'll keep the old-world distributionistas scratching their heads. Just like Kerry (or was it Bush ... or is it both), they're an ostrich with their head in the sand. Come on guys, be the eagle. BE THE EAGLE.

As seen on slashdot.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 09:27 PM in general | Comments (2)