Dave Winer <dave@userland.com> wrote:
Chris Lydon has been doing a series of audio interviews on his weblog here at Harvard. There are already over 25 interviews, representing 40 separate MP3 files. The archive all the interviews is nearly 300 megabytes. It's a perfect application for RSS enclosures. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/lydon/specialRssFeed
I wonder if this could be combined with BitTorrent? That would both speed up the individual downloads and spread the bandwidth penalty across more sites. With the archive now over 300Mb, BitTorrent would be a good plan anyway.[1]
I think there's some potential overlap here with iRate as well. To work properly that needs a back channel so that the client can inform the server of ratings and the server can in turn decide what music to suggest next. By time shifting the downloads via enclosures, you could have a fresh batch of MP3s every morning.
[1] A couple of days ago I downloaded a Knoppix CD image of 699Mb. My cable connection is supposed to be 600Kbps down. BitTorrent maxed this out for 3 hours or so at an average of ~60KBps. The software works!
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