Nice story at the New York Times on the rise of mythtv and the implications of bit torrent meets the network line-up.

Mr. Poltrack of CBS said that according to his network's research, a large number of viewers would welcome the chance to pay $1 to watch each television show, if they could do it on their own schedule and with the ability to skip commercials. With commercials, they'd be willing to pay 50 cents. And because the average viewer sees only half of a show's episodes, he said, this on-demand viewing won't hurt the regular showing.

There is no longer a limit to the number of torrents you can have Prodigem host. This is per my post the other day where I decided that it's a confusing thing to limit and isn't really needed anymore. However, in it's place, I have had to set a limit on the minimum size of a torrent that Prodigem will now allow you to create. This limit is 5MB. Hopefully you find this tradeoff to be a good one (any older torrent below this threshhold will not be affected).

I'm also now trying some new things with the main tracker page. Between the 40th and 50th minute of every hour, Prodigem will display results sorted by activity (the number of seeders on a torrent), and between the 50th minute and the top of the hour, Prodigem will display results sorted by the number of downloads (the number of complete transfers). During all other times, the listing will be as normal, sorted by the newest torrent first. Welcome to the Prodigem Hosting Channel. Stay tuned.

Here's a short article with some Prodigem press. It's interesting in the "real" media world: you do an interview and if the reporter doesn't bother to tell you it's been published (he didn't), and if the story contains no linkbacks to your site (it doesn't), you have no way of knowing it even exists. Anyway, no harm, no foul, just an interesting phenomenon.

From http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3464141:

"I think there is demand because of the budding movement of the independent media producer. With podcasters and videobloggers quickly becoming established, they need new types of bandwidth solutions," Lerhaupt told internetnews.com. "And since bloggers really take to community-oriented approaches, BitTorrent really fits well."

Prodigem now pings Technorati each time you create or update a torrent. The ping points Technorati to the details page for your torrent and I have also added support for Technorati tags which can be entered as a comma-separated list from the torrent creation/edit pages. Prodigem and Technorati take it from there.

Just today I've seen two examples, one from ibiblio, the other from hurricane electric, of dedicated torrent hosting. It seems like Prodigem is onto something here :). Now, how to stay ahead of the curve? The answer is for Prodigem to keep on the path of the groundbreaking, and I've got some ideas as good as the original...

(Via Thomas Winningham and slashdot)

By default prodigem currently allows users to have prodigem seed 3 torrents. This number 3 is referred to as your hosted torrent allowance. I'm thinking of removing this concept all-together from Prodigem.

For one, I think it's confusing to the novice user. But more importantly, with the controls I've implemented to limit storage space and limit user's bandwidth, I'm no longer sure it's necessary to have a third control to limit the number of torrents you can have prodigem seed for your account (as the two others in a way already do limit the number of torrents you can have prodigem actively seed).

Though, the upside of keeping the allowance is that each torrent that prodigem hosts spawns a new thread internally which, as an aggregate, affects the load put onto the Prodigem server. However, I've lately gotten my load problems under control and am not sure I need to be as conservative anymore about protecting myself from this.

Thoughts? I can't imagine any user saying I should keep it. How should I handle the malicious user who might try to have prodigem seed an excessive number of very small torrents? Limit torrent size to >1MB? Right now there is only 1 torrent (out of 68) which is below this threshhold (I'd of course grandfather it in).

That's me on the left with prodigem in the background.

Rocketboom's (Andrew Baron) pronunciation for prodigem. cool. just to clarify, it's:

pra-da-jem

Just got done with my demo during the Tools discussion. Went great! Since Prodigem is end to end bit torrent management, my demo was the end to end process. I started by creating a short video, uploaded it to Prodigem, and then created a torrent. You can find that torrent here.

Hopefully soon I'll be able to get my hands on the whole video from the demo so I can torrent that too.

Some more vloggercon links:
Napsterization
Dylan (world's youngest videoblogger)
Steve Garfield
flickr

I'm off to NYC tomorrow for Vloggercon. I'm a tool, or should say Prodigem will be one of the many tools demonstrated during the Video Blogging tools discussion. Something tells me that video of the event will be made available.

The day I follow google's suggestion and install the new MT plugin, I get more comment spam in any one day than previous. Who forgot to tell them?

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.

I've just completed some upgrades, which besides making the Prodigem site faster overall, now moves all URLs under the moniker prodigem.com. The Prodigem tracker is now located at prodigem.com/torrents/. Of course, all old URLs and torrents are backwards compatible so this should all be transparent.

The Torrentocracy blog and website will remain under Torrentocracy.com.

Prodigem and Torrentocracy will be down tonight for around 3 hours starting at 2 AM EST. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

I heard some complaints that the Revenge of the COMMoNISTS video I posted last week wasn't playing audio for some. Some tinkering later, and I've now got the Lessig part of that video converted to an AVI which seems to play fine both on my Linux and Windows boxen (ironically, with respect to the contents of this video, I was forced to use the 'Microsoft MPEG-4 v2' video codec to get the video to play on Windows). Please try out the new torrent and let me know if you have any problems (I'm especially interested to hear from mac people, working or otherwise).

As for the process, and for anyone who has purchased a Panasonic Dsnap sv-av50 camera, here's the (linux) command to convert the asf to avi. Be sure to use the 'super fine' (15fps) mode as the 'extra fine' (30fps) can't be played except on Windows as of yet:

mencoder -oac pcm -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2 -ofps 15 in.asf -o out.avi

This camera is all about convenience and size. It's lacking in recording quality (especially in dim light) and though you can record at 30 frames per second as said above, you'll be the only one able to watch the video (and only if you run Windows).

Eric Rice wrote me today with a great idea. Why not devise a way for Prodigem to pull content into your account directly from the web? Since most people provide both the hard copy of their content as well as a link to the torrent on their website, why force them to upload the hard copy to their website and then go through the arduous home-upload-speed task of then also uploading it to Prodigem. Done.

You can now pull content into your account directly from the web. You simply tell Prodigem the URL, it goes off and does its thing and when the process is complete it emails you. Thanks, Eric.

The guys over at the Promiscuous Bullet have published their latest podcast which includes an interview I did with them over the holiday break. We talk bit torrent and the future of Prodigem. The torrent can be found over on Prodigem. Notes to myself, need to avoid saying "umm" in interviews and already since the interview, more info on exeem has emerged and it turns out to be just some disappointing hype.

Over on the ProdigemWiki someone put a feature request to allow for the upload of an icon or other graphic for a torrent. I'm not sure exactly what they had in mind, but in the description of your torrent, you can already include an IMG html tag to accomplish something like this. Does this fit your idea?

Also, I've had a couple emails come my way about RSS feeds so I thought I'd go over that too. The rss feed for all torrents on Prodigem:

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

The rss feed for the video category (other categories have other numbers):

http://www.torrentocracy.com/prodigem/rss.php?cat=1

My personal prodigem feed:

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

Had the pleasure of attending the Creative Commons 2nd Anniversary Party last night. Besides all the kibitzing and the fun part of actually putting faces to the names of random people I've shared email with in the past year, there was a half-hour presentation by the Creative Commons honchos. Amongst the varied speakers, topics included Creative Commons highlights of the previous year, introduction of the new Science Commons, but the highlight was the ending sendup that Lawrence Lessig did of BillBoard and BillGates (replete with darth vader imagery). This, of course, in response to new campaigns launched by both attempting to discredit the Creative Commons, open licensing and the free culture movement through various FUD techniques.

Lessig puts it this way: we certainly aren't communists (where the state owns everything) and we certainly aren't fascists (ahem, where monopolistic corporations own everything). We're COMMoNISTS. And we're not alone.

In fact, you can watch the full 30 minute presentation in asf format from the Creative Commons party yourself. And if you're impatient, the Lessig stuff starts at 24:30. Here's the torrent (as hosted on Prodigem, sheesh couldn't make it a whole entry without mentioning prodigem).

The outfoxed torrent that I'm hosting on Torrentocracy just passed the 1 Terabyte of total data transfer mark. Put another way, that's over 1,000 Gigabytes of traffic or yet another way, over 1,000,000 Megabytes of traffic. Simply put, this is much more bandwidth than one could reasonably afford and instead its all been contributed by the downloaders of Outfoxed through the magic of bit torrent. The future of the independent media distributor is a bright one.

Went to the first session of Howard Rheingold's Literacy of Cooperation Humanities course at Stanford. Today's assignment was to blog about it :). Favorite part was the tidbit about the Inuit saying, "the best place for my surplus is in my neighbor's belly." The plan is to have the video from the sessions put up as a torrent on Prodigem so I'm looking forward to that. In other news, I booked a flight today for Vloggercon, the Video Blogger conference. That's being held in NYC on Jan 22nd.

A bug in the daily script which gets run to check bandwidth and cycle accounts each month to renew bandwidth had a bug which unfortunately caused all those currently hosting torrents on Prodigem to receive an errant email stating that their account was over quota. My apologies, please ignore todays email. To make matters worse, when attempting to manually restart 5 of the 30 or so torrents on Prodigem, it looks like I corrupted the stored info rendering those 5 torrents worthless. The other 25 torrents were fine and this was just an isolated one-time problem, but nonetheless, my apologies for the inconvenience my bumbling has caused.

I will try my best to keep this from happening again. For the small number of you that had your torrents deleted, I very much invite you to recreate the torrent and have Prodigem host it once again. No internally stored content was lost.