"p2p" entries
RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized
Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were
mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by
companies running social networks. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices. Instead of the constant churning among the commercial sites du jour (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), the next generation of social networking increasingly appears to require a decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure. This article looks at efforts in that space and suggests principles to guide development.
Author Paulo Coelho Illustrates the Upside of Openness
Budding authors may not be able to duplicate the success of Paulo Coelho, but Coelho's willingness to experiment across mediums is certainly worth studying. From Jeff Jarvis' Guardian column: Coelho is the thoroughly modern author. But he still believes in print. For him, this isn't a matter of print v digital. It's a question of what comes when you add…
Report: Radiohead Experiment Yields Indirect Success
A new research report says Radiohead’s In Rainbows experiment diverted a degree of traffic — and value — toward the band’s site.
Opportunity Turns the Tables on Piracy
The Economist examines the underlying business opportunities created by piracy: Piracy can also be a source of innovation, if someone takes a product and then modifies it in a popular way. In music unofficial remixes can boost sales of the original work. And in a recent book, "The Pirate's Dilemma", Matt Mason gives the example of Nigo, a Japanese designer…
Ignite Boston shows the way to beat commerce interruptus
I felt like was I drifting back to the dot-com boom last night during
Ignite Boston.
Movements that I saw getting stalled seven years ago seem to be
finding their way forward again. I think such projects, nationwide, will pull us out of the
slump that left so many dreams in the bit bucket after 2001.
TorrentSpy Hit with $110+ Million Copyright Judgment
Defunct BitTorrent index TorrentSpy has been ordered to pay more than $110 million in damages for copyright infringement. From News.com: The judge ordered TorrentSpy to pay $30,000 per copyright infringement — for 3,699 films and shows. That works out to be worth $110,970,000. TorrentSpy shut down its site in March. Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney in the copyright suit, tells News.com…
Responsibly Assuaging Author Concerns about File Sharing and "Piracy"
Eric Freeman, co-author of O’Reilly’s Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML and Head First Design Patterns, recently asked via email about a rise in activity for Head First books on a popular file-sharing site. His query sparked an interesting thread on the Radar back-channel that I thought worth sharing here. The original question (sent to Tim O’Reilly, who…