There was some delay in getting prodigem.com's DNS switched over earlier today. So, no worries, Prodigem URLs for user pages, user rss feeds, .torrent files, torrent info pages and the Prodigem torrent tracker should now properly resolve to their corresponding resting place at MoveDigital. All other Prodigem URLs will now resolve to the open greeting explaining the MoveDigital switchover.

Since there is no longer a master listing of content as was found in Prodigem's main torrent listing, Prodigem's main rss feed and category feeds no longer exist. In the future, we are considering adding a 'presentation layer' to MoveDigital to showcase user's content, but for our initial launch we didn't want to just throw something together that wouldn't be excellent.

If you run into any bugs with an old Prodigem URL, please let me know.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:11 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Following Prodigem's acquisition back in March, I've been hard at work working with a great group of folks to retool Prodigem for rerelease as a new service. I'm happy to report that today that new service launches, and the web service formerly known as Prodigem is now known as MoveDigital.

http://www.movedigital.com

The focus of the service is centered on moving your digital data (hence the name). So beyond just publishing BitTorrents, the service also does direct download publishing as well as mobile phone video and audio publishing (just like our publishing of torrents, we convert your video and audio to mobile phone format for you, and then also take care of the streaming to your 3G cell phone).

So do stop on over and check it out. All Prodigem user accounts and content have been transferred over. Your usernames are still the same, and all Prodigem users also get a free 1 year membership. We're pleased also to announce that Senator John Edwards is our first official customer, not only using MoveDigital to distribute his videos for the mobile phone, but also to be distributed for the first time via BitTorrent.

There's a lot more too. We've created this very cool web widget that makes it very simple to reblog your MoveDigital links. And included with this web widget, via its 'Share' button, is a notion we're calling 'social bandwidth sharing' which allows other users to directly add bandwidth into your account from wherever you may have placed your widget. Moreover, MoveDigital bandwidth is different than what you'll find anywhere else. For direct downloads, we only deduct bandwidth from your account for completely delivered files. You don't get penalized if someone stops downloading half way through. As well, your bandwidth always rolls over to your next membership period, so it's always there for you.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 09:26 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Good news! Prodigem has been acquired by a Bay Area startup. We'll be retooling the site, adding some functionality, and perhaps changing the name so keep your pants on and be on the lookout for a relaunch with some nice extra goodies. More info later ...

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:58 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Here's an interview for eHub about Prodigem I did a while back that they put up this week, and here's an IPTV feature that PC Magazine is running on their site that puts Prodigem at the top of their torrent page (though I guess we need to work more on our description display ... though I wonder if they wrote this before the last redesign went live).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 05:52 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

I've given Prodigem's torrent page a facelift. The style is less tabular, more conversational and something akin to digg. It also allows room for a right hand column which I intend to continue to refine. I added some google ads to try my hand at those again. Hopefully I can coax google into providing more than just ads for illegal torrent sites with the added context of longer torrent descriptions made possible by this new layout. Look good? Yes? No?

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:20 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Prodigem already has a few ajaxishy elements in its UI, but I've replaced the file upload mechanism with an ajax widget of its own. Rather than the old system which would spawn an ugly window to tell you the progress of your file upload into Prodigem, the new control, powered by Encodable has a progress meter which appears in the browser to let you know the progress of the upload. I still have some kinks to work on rather large file uploads (>150MB) where it seems to hang at the end, but otherwise its a nice enhancement and fun to play with.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:47 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Switched off mysql-pconnect on Prodigem which, while still sluggish at times, was a quick fix to handle growth.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:28 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Ever since introducing Auto RSS Torrent, Prodigem has been seeing a healthy increase in traffic. Some of this has been causing some strain and yesterday, while doing some code clean up, I inadvertently broke the tracker. The result today was a day of broken torrents. It looks like I resolved my foul up. Sorry for the inconvenience.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 05:40 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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...

By Gary Lerhaupt, 07:23 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 06:50 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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've used the iTunes/eBay analogy myself from time to time. It should indeed be interesting to see how they build this into their client. One slashdotter shares my sentiments.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:35 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:09 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:28 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:10 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:28 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

The guys over at Programmable Web have put together a great site chronicling all of the 'Web 2.0' resources to be found on the internet. In distilled form, they have a mashup matrix which now also includes the intersection of Prodigem's API and del.icio.us.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:47 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Looks like I'll be heading to the Open Media Developers Summit taking place the weekend of October 21st in New York. I imagine many of the same people from the first ever vloggercon will be there, but the focus on this one is bringing together grass-roots projects with their more commercial counterparts to create a fun happy place on the internet. Here's a list of participants for the summit (so far).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:50 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

There was a slight tick in PEP as it was released that at times could cause it to think it wasn't handling proper XML from Prodigem's API. It turns out that when doing an HTTPS 1.1 POST, the chunked-encoding returned could at random times
include hex mixed in with the server response. By tweaking the PEP script to use HTTPS 1.0, it's resolved. So you can either search for "1.1" in your script and change the one occurance to "1.0" or just download PEP with the fix.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 08:59 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

On Friday it was reported that BitTorrent Inc. has taken in 8.75 million in venture funding. Certainly this is good for the technology, though I do see them coming in shortly and offering lots of similar types of services as seen on Prodigem. It will be interesting to see how exactly it is packaged, the role of DRM, and what is and is not hooked into their code-base.

But there is lots of content to go around, and I look forward to keep on going after it, doing what I'm doing while continuing to build community web efforts.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 07:49 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Rocketboom, perhaps the most popular video blog on the internet, has installed PEP into their setup allowing them to automatically have torrents created for each video blog they produce. Check out Rocketboom's Prodigem user page and RSS torrent feed.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:06 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

I got back earlier today from Digimart, the global digital (film) distribution summit, in Montreal. The conference was 2/3 days of sessions on the topics of digital film and on its implications of distribution, both hard-copy and digital. In a word, it was great.

The conference was organized by Daniel Langlois (founder of Soft Image, a pioneer in digital effects ala Jurassic Park) and was truly international in its make-up. Besides numerous Canadian and American film-makers and distributors there were also those from the U.K., Australia, Brazil, Peru and China. And those were just the people I met. But the bottom line is that this group of Independent type film makers were quite convinced that the future of everything film is digital.

Mark Cuban gave the keynote where he discussed HDNet's new "day and date" release strategy where they were going to simultaneously release new movies in cinema on HDnet/cable and on DVD all on the same day. To compensate for this radical approach, initial DVDs would cost perhaps $10 more and they would kick back 1% of sales to the Cinema owners showing their movie to incentivize them to buy into this system. He also mentioned that HDNet would be making available what he called "laptop quality" copies for direct download of their films. I guess even the big boys can't afford to do full quality copies without embracing p2p.

In general I spent a lot of time soaking up knowledge from those in the film industry. For one, I can say that there is a lot of resistance to Hollywood's new "DCI" Digital Cinema Initiative. The general concensus (surprise) is that their new guidelines about showing HD films is all about their control of cinema and not at all about image quality. Though it also seemed the perception was that this was okay because it only shows them continuing to fumble the ball on content delivery allowing in the little guy to come in and provide lower-cost solutions with better image quality. I would say I tend to agree. I would say I'm also glad to watch most of the big guys continue to fumble the ball and provide these opportunities.

And overall, the panel and demo I did on Prodigem seemed to be a home run. Having spent two days in this first-of-a-kind conference sharing and creating a collective knowledge on how to make digital film distribution a reality, it was great to show that this didn't mean that film makers were confined to just selling DVDs from their websites while they wait 3-5 years for IPTV to become a reality. Without a hitch I had recorded the audio from the session before my panel, Cory Doctorow on DRM, and no less than 20 minutes after it ended was I able to show it turned around and ready for massive-scale digital distribution via a torrent. And though this could of course be used to sell movies through Prodigem, it could also be used for providing free outtakes and clips while a movie is even still in production, adding a new marketing arm to movie making.

Let's see where this takes us.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 07:51 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

My post to slashdot about PEP went live. I'm about to get on a cross-country flight to Montreal (for digimart) for the rest of the day, servers seem to holding up okay right now, let's hope it stays that way.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 08:13 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Introducing PEP, the Prodigem Enclosure Puller. With Prodigem's just released API, I was knocking around ideas about how to show it off quickly and effectively. I'm pretty happy with this first result. PEP is < 400 lines of PHP code I've thrown together (download it at http://prodigem.com/code/pep/pep.txt) which, when given your Prodigem username, password and an RSS 2.0 feed, will then find all the enclosures in that RSS feed and call into Prodigem to have a torrent created for each one. Automatically. You just run and/or cron the script on your home computer or web-server and PEP does the rest.

This bit of hackery (btw, the code has much room for improvement, please someone run with it) of course needed a good first RSS feed. Enter del.icio.us. Using their RSS feed for popular videos, Prodigem now automatically torrents the most popular videos on the web as decided by the del.icio.us folksonomy. That is to say, what the world wants, the world gets.

You can see the results on our newly created pep_delicious user page or even in pep_delicious's own Prodigem torrent feed. If you'd like to discuss PEP or the API (or this blog), that can be done in Prodigem's Forums.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:04 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Looks like it was exactly a year ago that Outfoxed was put up on Torrentocracy. Over 3500 downloads and almost 2 terabytes of traffic later, it's been a good run. But it's not over. In order to keep things consistent over here, we've moved the Outfoxed torrent and the Uncovered torrent from Torrentoracy's separate torrent section and into Prodigem under Jim Gilliam's account. The transition was seemless and the hashes were not changed, so any previous downloader can still seed if they like.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:26 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Mike Linksvayer of the Creative Commons wrote in with some good ideas about license handling. For one, Prodigem isn't yet on the CC 2.5 licenses, but more importantly there are whole swaths of licenses we don't contain or cover. Partly, I should say that this is on purpose. The one thing we do not want to do is overwhelm our users with too many choices. So I have taken Mike's best suggestion and implemented it. There is now an "other" choice available both from the UI and the API where users can manually enter the name and the URL which describes the license they wish to use if it does not appear on our default list. I think this will be a nice middleground for all.

And I'm also thinking about just flipping a switch to turn all my CC 2.0 licenses into 2.5 licenses, but I'm not sure where the differences lie.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 08:24 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

A first taker. Adriaan Tijsseling, who maintains ecto (a popular blogging tool), was key in pushing me to use a REST-based API for Prodigem. He's announced that a future version of both the mac and windows variants of ecto will support the API. Looking forward to that :).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 04:06 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

I'm pleased to announce our new API which will allow any web-capable application on the internet the ability to use Prodigem's creation, hosting and management of torrents through a nice standards based interface. The docs are located at http://torrentocracy.com/mediawiki/index.php/Prodigem_API (the wiki includes links to a live demo page). All you need is a Prodigem account and as it so happens, for a limited time we've opened up our free Preview Account so that they come with full upload and torrent creation capabilities. That last part is a first for us as well, so get 'em while they're hot (and free).

And as it so happens, we've also nicely integrated the phpBB forum and messaging system into Prodigem so there's now a nice shiny place to discuss new things like the API (http://www.prodigem.com/forums/) or just generally mingle.

So all you internet programming types have a look at the API and tell us what you think. We're excited to see what you come up with now that every web application out there can have a 'make me a torrent' button. Or maybe it will be called a 'save my blog from this slashdotting' button, or perhaps a 'our fanbase is community of people already looking for ways to help us' button, or 'my company is in a crunch, Prodigem to the rescue' button, or...

By Gary Lerhaupt, 07:01 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

I've been confirmed as a speaker at DigiMart which is taking place September 22-24 in Montreal. The summit is geared towards filmmakers and how exactly to go digital. I'll be taking part in the discussion on 'New Models on Hyperdistribution'. Looks like an exciting lineup. Though I don't know most of the film names, Mark Cuban has the keynote and Cory Doctorow looks to be discussing DRM = bad.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:21 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Just wrapped up a revamp of the Setting/Profile page on Prodigem. The old interface was clunky-- the new one conforms to our new user interface (give lots of detailed error messages) goodness. As well, it will allow us to easily add new twiddles and knobs to turn as we see fit in the future. The first new knob allows you to specify whether you'd like to have Prodigem update notices emailed to you so you can keep up to date should we decide to email the world. By default this is turned OFF in everyone's account as this seemed like the right thing to do. Gotta respect the opt-in default.

But I do plan on shortly sending out one email to everyone to at least let them know that it's set to off ... of course promising to never email them directly again unless they turn it back on. Which of course everyone should.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:15 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

I've been throwing around the idea of making Prodigem Starter Accounts (currently $1) just free. We haven't had any piracy problems to date and making things more accessible would help to get things rolling a bit more. Though, these new "Preview" accounts might not come with the ability to sell content. Not sure.

We're on the verge of making available some great new funtionality and I wouldn't want to keep people from it. :)

DEVELOPING LATE... (or whatever that means)

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:05 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

After seeing a BoingBoing mention publicizing Creative Commons licensed CDs, I'm glad to now say that tr^ad has put their first release on Prodigem.

It's the full CD available for 99 cents. To get a feel for the music, you can download selected tracks from them for free to preview it out. On second thought, they decided that an album named 'Public Domain' should be free so they've made it free. The Prodigem release includes 320k MP3 versions of all tracks on the album and front and back covers in high resolution for easy printing.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:10 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

been focused on a number of prodigem things which i'm not ready to announce. as a result the blogging has been light so far this summer. hopefully more later...

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:42 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

After getting yet another Prodigem referral today from Todd Cochrane's Podcasting Book, I decided to finally check it out for myself. What I thought was just a short mention of Prodigem is in actuality 4 pages (pg 207-211) of screenshots and tutorials on how to use Prodigem and why it is beneficial to podcasters. Wow, thanks Todd.

I've since been making my way through the book and it's pretty thorough. Topics range the full gamut from finding podcasts, podcatching software, to starting your own with home equipment or more high-end equipment, to post-production and publishing (where Prodigem comes in). Of course any recommendation of mine to pick it up is skewed, but take a look for yourself and you'll probably be sold.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:21 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

All Prodigem accounts now have, by default, a setting called 'Auto Folder Creation' turned on. This means that as you upload files into your account, Prodigem creates a new folder for each based off of the name of the file you are uploading. So, to create a single-file torrent (the most common type), it just now takes 2 steps: upload file, fill out torrent form. You can turn this setting off in your account from 'My Profile'.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 08:30 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Finished up attending Supernova today. It was a different mix then some of the other more blogging focused ones that I've been to-- definitely older and more suitish. But definitely a good experience. Enjoyed the second day more than the first though I spent most of the time on irc in order to take part in the discussion (i see why people harp on the unconference thing). In fact the backchannel was worthwhile after all, debunking one panel member's assertion that lemonade stands are not to be found in San Francisco-- the collaborative #supernova effort hooked up an SD card reader to the camera with said picture on it in order to get it on flickr and shown to the room before the talk was done. Oh yeah, and there was some collaborative Mac-only concurrent note taking system that some were using together that was interesting. It allows people to take notes together at the same time, though is, as mentioned, just mac only. Worse, the name of it alludes me completely with no luck from google either. But an app whose time has come for sure.

Also had an interesting conversation about improving the UI in Prodigem. When I suggested that I was thinking about including a one-form wizard to add a more streamlined way to make a torrent, Kevin Marks from Technorati gave me the comparison that was sure to stop me in my tracks-- "thats the way Microsoft would solve the problem". Dead on. Why make a complex interface and then be forced to make a 2nd interface?

So a bit of brainstorming and the idea that I'm really starting to like is to make it so that uploaded files automatically create and get placed in a folder which is named the same as the file (perhaps I'll lop off the file extension for the folder name though). So for the first time user there's no folder creation, just an upload and the torrent form where they select the folder that was auto-created. This default behavior will be initially set on all accounts, but I'll add a setting switch to turn it off to get the traditional behavior. Thus an experienced user can just enable the more powerful behavior when they've got the hang of things. This is good. Hopefully I'll get to this soon.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:11 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Prodigem is now open to the public. Anyone can now obtain a Prodigem account with access to distribute *and* sell content for a one-time $1 fee. We also have introduced "Value" and "Deluxe" (yes boring marketing names) accounts which provide more bandwidth and storage for a monthly fee just like a more traditional hosting service (but of course Prodigem has its marketplace built in). See the descriptions of our hosting packages or just sign up.
 

	Limited	Starter	Value	Deluxe
Price	FREE	$1.00/one-time (or FREE with any content purchase)	$6.95/month	$14.95/month
Disk Space	0	100 MB	500 MB	1500 MB
Monthly Bandwidth	0	3 GB	15 GB	45 GB
Post Comments	yes	yes	yes	yes
Distribute Content	no	yes	yes	yes
Sell Content	no	yes	yes	yes
	Try It	Order Now	Order Now	Order Now

 
By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:25 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Fading Ways Music has joined Prodigem and are now making 4 of their albums available in both mp3 and flac format. The albums in mp3 are available for $6.99 while the albums in flac format (CD audio quality) are available for $8.99 and include bonus CD artwork. For more information on Fading Ways, check out this recent interview that Neeru Paharia did with Neil Leyton for the Creative Commons website.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:48 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

It's a podcast in Dutch but available both directly from curry.com or from Prodigem. In his Daily Source Code from May 5th he confessed to bandwidth woes and his desire to hook into BitTorrent, so we'll see where this goes. I think there are all kinds of possibilities. Namely, higher-quality mp3s for the podcast as well as bundling featured songs as separate mp3s for the downloaders convenience.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:44 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Hectic-ity has certainly kept me away from the blog as of late, but wanted to pop in to mention Prodigem's new partnership with The Weblog Project. Robin Good is leading an effort to chronicle and interview leading bloggers on what all this blogging means and where it's taking us. The result will be a creative commons licensed movie and I'm glad to help out as needed.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:41 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

I've been taking notes on yesterday's viral video posting from BoingBoing on Prodigem of the Berkeley Laptop Thief rant. It shot to the number one spot (past the tsunami downloads) within 6 hours for most complete downloads. Even at this moment, it sports greater than 400 seeders and has been seeing a steady average of 10-20 "leechers" at any given time. A leecher in BitTorrent parlance is just the name given to someone that hasn't completed the download of the content. People with completed downloads are called "seeders" (seeders who stick around to help seed the torrent are the people that make bit torrent work).

Though, I've never quite cared for the term leecher. As it turns out, on the day prior to the BoingBoinging, I completed some upgrades to Prodigem which provide insights into the upload/download status of torrenters at the point at which they complete their download. To that end, at this very moment, with 8171 complete downloads, "leechers" (the people who themselves haven't even finished getting the whole video) have just past 1 GB of donated aggregate bandwidth to the laptop rant cause.

Still, some may scoff at this number in comparison to the total amount of bandwidth consumed (4.9MB * 8171 downloads =~ 40 GB), but I'm still impressed by this 1/40th effort. Considering that at any given time you join the torrent, there are roughly 20 times more people with the entire content available, I would say it's a rather valiant showing for the lowly leecher. Moreover, over 35% of all leechers provided at least 1 Byte of upload before completing their download.

So, why give a name with such negative connotation to those who haven't completed their downloads? After all, we all start out this way. Such is how it is. Perhaps leeches (and maggots) just need a PR makeover.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:42 AM in prodigem | Comments (3)  

BoingBoing's doing the Prodigem thing again, this time to distribute out a video of Berkeley Prof ranting about his stolen laptop. They've got the viral touch (as in everything they touch turns viral). It's not such a bad thing. Currently there are 129 seeds.

Also, Sao Bento Music has taken up Prodigem to help sell for $0.99 an mp3 single from one of their artists, d.biddle. Now I just need the viral touch on the Prodigem marketplace...

By Gary Lerhaupt, 03:02 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

If you're going to start out an online marketplace, you might as well start it off with something cool like High Definition. The movie is called On Our Way Up, runs about 3GB in size. It's about escaping a life of drugs and killing in Atlanta's "Zone 6." Here's where you can buy it. For more info, check out the press release.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:30 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs:

Success will depend on achieving a critical mass of culture creators and paying culture consumers -- but if that happens, Lerhaupt might well have come up with a viable answer to the DRM wars.

Joi Ito, Joi Ito Web:

I'm very interested in the economics of the end of the long tail. My theory is that people will pay, even if they are not forced. I think price, the experience and the lack of DRM should have an impact.

David Weinberger, Joho the Blog:

I hope the marketplace takes off. But I'm worried about the "small monthly fee" Prodigem will require of users once it's out of beta. It may keep the chicken from ever getting out of the egg. But I assume they've thought this through better than I have.

Om Malik, Om Malik on Broadband:

Enck and I agree - this distribution model has legs

Marc Canter, Marc's Voice:

Gary Lerhaupt and the folks [at] Prodigem are gonna give Jeremy Allaire and Brightcove a run for the money - with the opening up of Prodigem Torrents marketplace.

Jordan Running, p2p.weblogsinc.com:

Prodigem has long been providing BitTorrent hosting services for legally-licensed material. Now they’re doing what I believe is a first: Selling BT downloads.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:49 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

A whole new look to the front page of prodigem.com. Check it out.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:39 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Interested in helping to weave together a new marketplace for the independent media producer? Prodigem has just launched a new part of its service that allows you to sell your content. Check out more info for all the details, but the gist is that you will shortly be able to upload your content into Prodigem, name your selling price and then have Prodigem collect your revenue while controlling access to the torrent. We take out 10% + transaction costs (PayPal) and then once a month you get a check in the mail. You're happy, we're happy and your customers are happy because they get stuff they can own with no DRM. If you want to try your hand at the new market, this torrent shows what everything looks like. The content is a 10 minute documentary I put together and as an example is available for $0.99.

As it so happens, we are currently looking for a handful of people excited by this opportunity with content that they'd like to sell. Please get in contact with our request address if you are interested.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:28 AM in prodigem | Comments (7)  

Spent the weekend giving Prodigem a makeover. Not fun work, but definitely nice to have everything consistent feeling. Hope you like it. Now with Prodigem, Inc. official (actually official as of April 1st, which explains the delayed mention) you can expect some very cool things on the near horizon. Oh, and no corporate worries please, if I should in the future need to decide to start charging for any services you are currently receiving for free, I promise at least a 1 year heads up.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:53 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

I've added the ability to apply Creative Commons Sampling Licenses on your Prodigem hosted content.

I'm still playing around with my idea for Copyright Plus Prodigem and also settled on the metadata scheme to call out licenses within torrents (Instead of describing it with an "about" entry, it'll be under a "url" entry which is more natural).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:12 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

On a couple of occasions, people have expressed hesitancy to post content on Prodigem as the only licensing option made available is the Creative Commons. Sure, we may all love the Creative Commons and I might even be blogging right now in my creative commie t-shirt, but sometimes it just doesn't fit (the license, not the t-shirt). It could be that the content can't necessarily be cleared for Creative Commons, or it could be that they're not quite ready to make the leap, but it is apparent that I need to make some alternatives available.

So, I'd like to float the idea of what I'm calling Copyright Plus Prodigem for specific use on my site. The basic premise is that you declare your content as still under Copyright, but you make a licensing allowance specifically to Prodigem and its users such that they can redistribute your work only through the bit torrent session that you make available. In effect this allows you to go the extra step of letting people redistribute while realizing the wonders of peer-to-peer, but without giving up the control you might not be willing to give (eg. with the creative commons, you can't control where and how people redistribute your work). From my perspective, this might be the exact kind of thing you might be looking for if you wanted to sell your content through Prodigem :).

And to that end, I've been in a few discussions with the Creative Commons people about the possibilities and feasibility of something like a "Delayed" Creative Commons license. The idea here would be that you'd setup a date in the future where your work would automatically transition to a Creative Commons license. So, for example, you could initially use something like Copyright Plus Prodigem allowing you to possibly derive income from the content, and then after a year (or 5 years, or 10 years) the work automatically transitions to a Creative Commons license of your choosing enabling the general public to do with it what they may. The possibilities abound.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:21 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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)  

Bram Cohen was on the cover of the 2.21.05 edition of Red Herring. The article is a view into the business of bit torrent, and the future directions there are from monetizing the tech. It seems Bram and some others are working on business plans to provide search services within the context of torrent tracking and have actually formed the Bit Torrent Corporation. The article mentions BlogTorrent, Hurricane Electric and also something I wasn't familiar with from Aelitis which appears to offer Bit Torrent consulting services for businesses. And, oh yeah, they've got a blurb on Prodigem as well:

Prodigem--run by lone-wolf Stanford graduate student Gary Lerhaupt--started a content distribution service for individuals in December. Mr. Lerhaupt's dedicated server acts as a "permaseed" for service users, hosting the full copy of a file that's necessary for a torrent download to continue. He fends off illegal use by offering service by invitation, a la Gmail. At press time, Mr. Lerhaupt doesn't have a PayPal account set up for donations from his happy customers.

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

Enjoying the bit of free time I have this afternoon since my Operating System's class final was cancelled (my prof received tenure yesterday and in celebration, just up and cancelled it) (who says tenure doesn't corrupt), I've gone ahead and tweaked Prodigem such that if you want or need to put out torrents smaller than 5MB, it is now possible. Drop me an email and I can tag your account to allow this, but in general I should think its only a worthwhile thing to have if you think you have a small file that many many people are going to want.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:38 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

The Creative Commons amicus brief submitted by Lawrence Lessig in support of Grokster in MGM v. Grokster mentions both Prodigem and Torrentocracy:

These innovations in the use of p2p technologies to date point to obvious, and important uses of p2p technologies tomorrow. There is a wide range of speakers who could use p2p technologies to spread video content who could not afford such distribution without it...Political campaigns could enable the cheap distribution of campaign ads. Already, companies are beginning to offer p2p hosting to service precisely this type of demand. See, e.g., Prodigem, at link # 13.

and:

P2P technologies have also inspired creators to offer their creative work in new, and different ways. Filmmaker Robert Greenwald, for example, has made the source interviews for his latest documentary available for free download using Bit-Torrent technology. See Torrentocracy Blog, at link # 10.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:08 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

I've modified Prodigem to allow anyone to create a limited account which will allow you to sign into Prodigem so that you can comment on a torrent and join in and create discussions. These accounts by default do not allow uploading of files or the creation of torrents. However, with an invitation from any full-access Prodigem user, your account can be enabled for full access as well (or, as before, if you don't have an account and you receive an invitation, this will still lead to a full-access account). This solution will bridge the gap to allow discussions to take place within Prodigem without having to open up everything to the uncertain nature of random internet uploads. Thus, to post torrents you still need someone to vouch for you.

Next step: revamping the comment system (now that everyone can use it).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 07:52 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

You might notice that things are a bit sluggish today on my domains. It looks like I may be butting up against a memory usage issue-- may need to throw some more RAM in to keep things running smoothly. I'm also beginning to wonder if I might need to put up a donation link to help with the costs.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:05 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

Whaddya think?

By Gary Lerhaupt, 10:06 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:21 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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."

By Gary Lerhaupt, 06:07 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 02:15 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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 Gary Lerhaupt, 11:40 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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).

By Gary Lerhaupt, 06:51 PM in prodigem | Comments (1)  

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

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:24 AM in prodigem | Comments (3)  

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

pra-da-jem

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:23 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:52 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 01:44 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 03:23 PM in prodigem | Comments (3)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:46 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:33 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 06:38 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)  

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)