I spent last night shoe-horning in more metadata in the .torrent files that Prodigem creates for its torrents. Dovetailing on the effort started by Thomas Winningham, I accomplished this by adding some new dictionary entries within the bencoded torrent format. My main goal was to add information about the license associated with the content delivered by the torrent, but along the way I decided to throw in tag info for good measure. Below is a basic example of data that will now be added to all Prodigem torrents (tabbed formatting added here for clarity):

7:license
d
     3:url
     43:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ 
e
4:tags
l
     11:hello world
     10:folksonomy
     11:another tag
e

The previous discussions linked to above on how to properly go about this were not quite definitive, so this is more of my best effort based on that. It's very much fluid so please send your feedback if you think this is all wrong (or if you think it's all right). With the license entry, I decided to make it into its own sub-dictionary to allow for larger, more precise, future descriptions. I described the URL under an "about" heading so as to match example RDF over at the Creative Commons After some feedback, the URL will be described by the keyword "url". The tags entry is straight-forward enough. It's just a list of folksonomy-enabling entries. Given recent interest I thought this might lead to ... well, who knows what...
 
UPDATE 3/24/2005: Given some feedback I've received, instead of using an "about" entry I'll be using a "url" entry.
 
By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:54 PM in prodigem | Comments (1)  

This is awesome. Way to go Gary.

Posted by: DaniellKrawczyk at March 25, 2005 01:33 PM