From January 2005's Wired Magazine, The BitTorrent Effect:

One example of how the world has already changed: Gary Lerhaupt, a graduate student in computer science at Stanford, became fascinated with Outfoxed, the documentary critical of Fox News, and thought more people should see it. So he convinced the film's producer to let him put a chunk of it on his Web site for free, as a 500-Mbyte torrent. Within two months, nearly 1,500 people downloaded it. That's almost 750 gigs of traffic, a heck of a wallop. But to get the ball rolling, Lerhaupt's site needed to serve up only 5 gigs. After that, the peers took over and hosted it themselves. His bill for that bandwidth? $4. There are drinks at Starbucks that cost more. "It's amazing - I'm a movie distributor," he says. "If I had my own content, I'd be a TV station."

Read the article, its an interesting profile on Bram Cohen and what bit torrent will bring. Of course, we're already seeing that today with Prodigem. :)

By Gary Lerhaupt, 07:08 PM in general | Comments (1)  

I've just completed a rework of the process by which Prodigem internally seeds its torrents. Hopefully this will help to lower the load on our server. This change necessitated that all directories for torrents be unique across the entire service, so you will now notice that when you create a directory within Prodigem, it will prepend your username to the directory name.

Let me know if you experience any problems or if your torrents aren't getting seeded correctly. You shouldn't notice any difference.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 05:48 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

It looks like the hosting service that Prodigem is run from shut down access for a couple hours this morning. I was running a high server load average. This was either caused by scaling issues on my part or perhaps something more nefarious. More later...

(as for good news, I've increased the maximum number of torrents that each account can host from 2 to 3)

By Gary Lerhaupt, 08:53 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Check out my interview with James Enck on The Broadband Daily about Prodigem. James is a self-proclaimed "bungling Luddite idiot" when it comes to using new technologies and concludes that he is "truly impressed with how easy this was to do". Cool.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:52 AM in prodigem | Comments (2)  

I've tried getting in touch with both of them to check out Prodigem from the Podcasters perspective as Prodigem is certainly a great way to democratize bandwidth and open the accessibility of podcasting to the average Joe. I haven't had much luck in getting a response from either. So, either they are both inundated with so much mail that they keep missing mine, or they are busy working on a solution of their own. Or, they could just not be interested, I guess. But they should be.

Anyway, if anyone has a line into either and agrees with me that this is something that podcasters should be eager about, please spread the word.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 03:16 PM in prodigem | Comments (1)  

Here's my new Prodigem RSS torrent feed:

http://www.torrentocracy.com/prodigem/rss.php/lerhaupt.xml

And my personal tracker page:

http://www.torrentocracy.com/prodigem/?user=lerhaupt

By Gary Lerhaupt, 05:32 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Ending my radio silence here. I've been heads down working on Prodigem which is a new content hosting web-service I've created. It relies on bit torrent to share the costs of the distribution of large files and is revolutionary in that you need only to upload your file via the web, click a few buttons and not only will it create a torrent for your content, but it will begin seeding it also.

This removes all complexity in the administration of bit torrent from start to finish and also enables you to take advantage of better initial download speeds since you aren't limited by your home DSL connection. You can read more about Prodigem here. Like I say there, if you are an artist, creator, author, blogger, podcaster, amateur mogul, lead guitarist, independent movie director or person, and you have material which has been licensed openly, such as with a Creative Commons license, the sky is now the limit.

We're currently in a limited beta testing phase, so in the meantime you might consider checking out the main tracker and joining torrents for any content you'd like. Hopefully we'll open to wider availability soon and as membership is being handled in the new school style of invitation propagation, watch your inbox for Prodigem email.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:04 AM in prodigem | Comments (4)