BitTorrent, Blogs and Web Proxies

Don Park gives a good overview of BitTorrent, but also provides an interesting perspective on how blog software in general could utilize BitTorrent technology.

“In my opinion, flash flood nature of blogs will be well served by BitTorrent. Likewise, link-happy nature of blogs will complement BitTorrent well. Ultimately, I think a tailored variation of BitTorrent should be built into blog clients and servers for download sharing of feeds, images, enclosures, and other blog-related resources. BitTorrent will encourage media-rich blog posts without applying power-law to the bloggers’ wallet. BitTorrent means blog torrents.”

I agree, but perhaps this idea shouldn’t be limited to just blogs. I believe it can be applied to any URI accessible resource.

It may have been said before, but I can imagine using P2P concepts like BitTorrent in a hybrid Smart Web Proxy.

For example, when a request for a URI is unavailable or times-out, the Smart Web Proxy would check trusted sources for a cached copy of the URI.

Specifically, these trusted cache repositories may well include: BitTorrent sources, Google’s Cache, The Way Back Machine, and perhaps even Freenet sources. Trusted BitTorrent sources can be determined by walking a list of peers culled from a users’ blogroll, which is of course managed via OPML.

Indeed, I’m taking the 500-foot view, but perhaps this is worth further investigation … note to self … see what you can dig-up on Google