Holy crap, indeed. This little news item will soon be #1 with a bullet, but Ev just announced at the Blogosphere panel I attended that Google bought Blogger. Ev told me after the panel that the deal has been in the works for four months and he’s already moved offices from San Francisco to Mountain View.

I would expect this means dedicated searching and ranking of weblogs a la Daypop/Blogdex, displaying aggregated weblog content in Google News, and time-based searching of weblogs. But they could do all those things now… Why buy Pyra? Is Google moving toward an expanded portal model of offering publishing/hosting services beyond searching?

In case you missed the memo, the peer-to-peer application du jour is DirectConnect and its better open-source cousin, DC++.

Their website says a petabyte (1,024 terabytes) is being shared on the network and I believe it. On any given public hub, it’s not uncommon to find individuals sharing 250 gigs or more of data; usually feature films, console games, and software. That’s insane.

What makes it different from the countless other peer-to-peer apps out there? Instead of relying on a central server or networked nodes, DirectConnect looks more like IRC: public or private hubs of individuals, each acting as networked file servers. You can only search the files shared by people connected to your own hub, which means less files but increased security.

Plus, it’s easy to create a private hub for your company or a group of friends, undetectable to any unwanted guests (like the MPAA). You can password-protect your hub too, for the very paranoid.

I’d love to set up a hub for archaic, out-of-print, or unavailable media, like Song of the South, abandonware, arcade ROMs, and bootleg remixes. Is anyone interested?

Continue reading “DirectConnect” →

Loudon Wainwright’s “Something for Nothing” is an entertaining and fair commentary on file sharing, from a songwriter’s perspective. Download the MP3 first, and read the lyrics below. (I’m not sure, but I think Loudon would approve.)

Continue reading “Loudon Wainwright's "Something for Nothing"” →

Freenet/Locutus creator Ian Clarke will be speaking at 7pm this Sunday at Chinatown’s C-Level, the neat art/tech collective co-founded by my friend Mark Allen.

Freenet was the first of the next-generation P2P applications, more concerned with anonymous and decentralized content redistribution than with swapping the latest Shania Twain single. Locutus is the commercial arm of Freenet, allowing people to search shared files in controlled groups. Following the lecture, there will be an open meeting of the spanking-new Los Angeles Art and Technology Hackers club. Should make for an interesting evening.

Matthew Ostrowski tacks MP3 headers onto random files, listening for interesting patterns in the raw data. According to Matthew’s friend, super-librarian Brewster Kahle, he found that .exe files sounded more interesting that plain .txt or .doc documents. So, courtesy of the Internet Archive and Etree.org, here’s Microsoft’s Word.exe file as an MP3.

Not easy listening, by any means, but a strange comfort to anyone waxing nostalgic for the music of synchronizing modems.