BitTorrent
Like many others, I find myself drawn to BitTorrent, but in my case, it's due to the implications of its distribution model on the rise of my video-as-grammar riff. (Quick refresher: I eagerly await the day our culture starts to cite and annotate video the way we do text.) A reader pointed me to his analysis of BitTorrent traffic given the whole SuprNova.com MPAA smackdown. His post is interesting - using data from a BitTorrent search engine (TowerSeek), he analyzed torrent file distribution across the web. The conclusions are not easily summarized, but two things jump out - one, there is a lot of centralization in torrents to date (hence the MPAA going after SuprNova and other large sites), but also, there is an *extremely* long tail - one that I would guess will only grow.
Comments
Don't forget Bittorrant works less well the further down the tail you go. It works best at the top end for the hot-off-the-press type stuff.
The upcoming exeem should solve any centralization issues. In the new model the .torrents are shared among a decentralized netork making searching and finding downloads independent of any central location. You literally publish to the network. Another interesting feature exeem will offer is the possibility to add a comment to a download making a running commentary of quality and such available to downloaders.
a Dutch researcher i know (Johan Pouwelse) did some research on the amount af data transferred using different P2P systems. See http://www.isa.its.tudelft.nl/~pouwelse/Bittorrent_Measurements_6pages.pdf
for a measurement before the shutdown took place. I believe he's working on a new measurement so we can see the impacht of the shutdowns shortly.
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