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Podcasting solution: Adam Curry has been trying to find a solution for podcasting’s bandwidth use. How about this? Have a whole bunch of RSS feeds. Every time someone looks for your RSS feed, they get a different feed - so, for instance adamcurry01.xml, adamcurry02.xml, adamcurry03.xml etc. There would be a smalll time difference between each file. So, for instance, if 01.xml publishes at 1pm, then 02.xml publishes at 1.30pm. The time variation could be varied by the bandwidth used. That way, the difference between n.xml and n+1.xml is dependent on how much bandwidth is used. Perhaps each n.xml would be mapped to a different server if you wanted to reduce the difference between n.xml and n+1.xml. This way, each podcatcher picks up the file over a longer period. What would be the best thing though? Archive.org could do the most useful thing ever - become a podcatcher. Basically, you publish an XML feed - let’s call it private.xml. You then ping archive.org who download the latest podcast from private.xml. They then republish the XML file replacing the enclosures with an archive.org URL. Here would be the cool bit though: if something fails to get in to the Internet Archive (if, for instance, it is libellous or copyright infringing), then the XML feed would be turned back to the original URL, and an email would be fired off to the podcaster. That would solve two problems: keeping archives and providing bandwidth. I know both of those kind of fit with the archive.org mission, and that would be a very cool way to solve the bandwidth problem.
