I've been trying to come up with a good general recommendation for how people should advertise their torrents on their blogs and webpages. The overall problem is overload. Per each entry item you start with at least the direct link to the content (.mp3, .avi, .etc). On top of this now you also want to direct people to the torrent for that item to try to save your bandwidth. Do you link to the .torrent itself or link to the details page for that torrent or link to your enclosure enabled torrent feed? It's a good thing to have these problems and all these choices, but a good web interface is both concise and consistent.

Linking to the .torrent seems the best thing to do as this ultimately shortens the distance between your audience and your content which drives downloads. I've noticed at least on the Prodigem tracker that people that put direct links to .torrents do in fact get more activity. Over on one of In.the.Trenches, I posted a comment about this where I noticed a lack of a direct .torrent link was having a negative impact on use. Kevin brings up a point about the need for merging all these feeds that people keep aquiring for their content. This is an interesting idea ... the superfeed, which is created by melting all your feeds together into a multiple enclosure per entry format...

Instead of having the list all your separate feeds, it'd be just one feed which declares what it supports (mp3, torrent, atom, rss, etc) and the aggregator would be responsible for choosing either based on its limitations or by the preferences set by the user. This certainly places a lot of emphasis on the aggregator to do this correctly, but it sure would be nice to have to only present one feed URL to your user. Another implementation would be to create some sort of stardard by which everyone would have a consistent interface to a singular syndication url on their site. Your aggregator would then poll the url for something like http://mysite.com/blog/feed?type=rss&enclosure=torrent and in turn, the feed script on your site would either provide the feed in this format or return a standard error that it doesn't support that format.
Hmm.

In the meantime, in a world of multiple feeds this isn't such a bad thing. I think its best just to have a separate corner on your blog where you present all the links to your feeds. Standard mp3 feed for the ease-of-use downloaders and torrent feed for the supportive-audience downloaders. Apart from that place for feed listings, each entry would then have the direct download link for that item and the .torrent link for that item.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 09:19 PM in general | Comments (0)