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.
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.)…
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.