When I interviewed Bram Cohen back in March I realized how brilliant BitTorrent was: a content-delivery mechanism that actually scales better than linearly. The more downloaders, the cheaper the cost per download. I’ve used BT on and off for a few months, but tonight I wanted to see the clip of John Stewart on CNN’s Crossfire (thanks, Dave). I clicked on the link and the download was painfully slow. Then I remembered — I recently re-initialized my firewall.
I forwarded ports 6881-6889 to my PC and re-started the download. Wow…superfast! If you have popular large objects, it’s awesome. But you already knew that, right?
And the Golden Rule of BitTorrent: When you’re done your download, don’t close the BitTorrent Window. Give unto others as you would have them give unto you. It costs you nothing.
Carl Franklin of .Net Rocks fame has launched a new company named Pwop to produce podcasts for others. Could this be the first commercial venture into podcasting? I’d take the credit for that honor, but IT Conversations doesn’t make real $$ yet. [Source: Robert Scoble]
Wait!…We had paying sponsors for our podcasts of Gnomedex 4.0. Could that be the first instance of paid sponsorship of podcasting? That might be a cool thing to remember in five years when everyone else is making a whole lot more money.
At first I thought podcasting would hurt broadcast radio, but after listening to Dave and Adam I think the opposite is true. Podcasting frees the radio broadcaster from the constraints of transmitters and geography. WHen they podcast, I can reach any radio station, anywhere, anytime. I haven’t done the math, but I expect that with BitTorrent delivery, the per-listener cost to the broacaster will be less than via the AM/FM airwaves. I haven’t been able to listen to Terry Gross for a long time because I’m working during her show, I refuse to pay Audible.com $14.95/month for the privilege, and manually download MP3s is a pain in the ass. Now I’m going to get one of those radio-to-MP3 devices and podcast it to myself.
So if I’m going to spend even more time listening to audio content — I’m already in the studio at least eight hours a day, and boy are my ears tired! — where’s that time going to come from? It’s already coming from television. Although podcasting is less than two months old, I can get content that is more inspirational, educational and entertaining through podcasting than I get from the broadcast or cable TV networks. I’m spending no less time on the Internet, and I predict others will likewise find that podcatching (listening to podcasts) will cause them to hit the OFF button on their TVs as well.