I'm at OMDS right now at NYU. Looks like there's some blog hub-bub about how "open" the conference is. But be sure to see Kenyatta's response.

I did my demo of Prodigem's Auto RSS Torrent yesterday. The demo wasn't completely flawless, but for flashiness I decided to use it to auto torrent Adam Curry. Here's his new torrent feed. Instant automated bandwidth savings, and he doesn't even know it yet...

Taking the "automatically torrent your RSS feed" idea I used for PEP which is an app I wrote to show off Prodigem's shiny new API, I have now distilled it as a direct feature of Prodigem. That means you can now just simply sign into your Prodigem account, go to your "Settings", tell Prodigem your RSS feed address and sit back and watch it auto-torrent. Here's what the Prodigem controls look like:

To put this plainly, this means you can just continue publishing your media through your blog or content management system as you always have, except now whenever your existing RSS feed gets updated, Prodigem reads it and spits out a torrent of your content. You tell your audience about your Prodigem RSS Torrent Feed and you are then automatically on the road to bandwidth redemption.

For the guts of how it works, Prodigem just scans your feed once an hour. It checks the latest 5 RSS items in your feed and if any contain an enclosure, it pulls that enclosure into your Prodigem account via the web and just torrents it. That's it. You can also specify if you want Prodigem to email you whenever it attempts to make a torrent, and you also specify the license you want to use for the content you distribute. Folks, it doesn't get any easier than this.

Bram Cohen and BitTorrent have a 5 page interview in Fortune Magazine. Choice excerpt:

Now it has the chance to cash in on the content itself. The company plans to establish a marketplace—part iTunes, part eBay—for bandwidth-intensive content. BitTorrent will host and index any content its creators want to sell (or give away, for that matter). It will generate revenue either by charging sellers a small commission or through related advertising.

I broke a rule of teh interweb today and broke what should be permalinks on Prodigem. Specifically, I changed the URL for Category related pages and RSS feeds. The old system was dumb, with the RSS feeds being based on the category id number (eg. 1.xml was the video feed) and the webpage having an ugly question-mark as part of the URL.

So now, for the RSS feed for the video category it's:
http://www.prodigem.com/torrents/rss/category_video.xml

And for the webpage for the video category it's:
http://www.prodigem.com/torrents/category_video.html

Much much nicer. The same new format holds for all the other categories as well.

Create and seed torrents directly from Drupal using the Prodigem module. Breyten Ernsting did the work on this as a member of the Drupal community. If you're a Drupal user, hop to it and let me know what you think.

I've pulled the google ads on the torrent description pages on Prodigem. Consistently they were links to sites with mostly illegal content. So, not exactly what I was looking for. In its place and on the main Prodigem torrent page, I'm using that space as a 'quick link' box to give fast access to the various sorts of Prodigem content. Much better.

I tweaked PEP so it now at least looks at the enclosure types in your RSS and if it sees the word 'audio' or 'video' in the enclosure type, it will set the torrent category appropriately. If it doesn't see either word, it sticks with its default, which is 'misc'.

Upon further reflection on an email I had with Andrew Baron of Rocketboom, I think I'm going to just go ahead and add PEP as a feature of each Prodigem account. At first I just wanted to show off the API using PEP as an application. I figure that's been done now, so why not add the kick-ass feature? I foresee a new setting where you just add your external feed url, and flip on PEP.