Aim Your Hot Glue Guns At Del.icio.us And BitTorrent

Inside my head, I sometimes refer to Del.icio.us as the Google In Reverse. Google has amassed a solid mound of ranked and twined web sites. The standings shift about with caution, the behemoths are tough to dethrone. And if I ask for Ruby, the answers in place may hold through the end of the year.

However, if I ask Del.icio.us about Ruby, I find myself in the midst of my language’s daily buzz. The links are fresh, the turnover occurs every day.

While Google initiates a person into topics on the Web, Del.icio.us follows the movement of that topic around the Web, as frequently as it’s fed. And Del.icio.us becomes Google In Reverse when you follow an RSS feed for a topic. I don’t need to go searching for Ruby any more, it all comes straight to me.

I love what Del.icio.us is doing for topics. And for the first time, I see a way that we could score a categorized file-sharing inbox for ourselves. It’s really simple to conceptualize, but we could use a tool to make it happen. I like the sharing of news and blog links, it’s basically peer-to-peer information sharing.

So, here’s the idea, illustrated through a few scenarios.

#1: The Topic Watcher

• A user visits a Del.icio.us topic page and is offered torrent links in addition to other links.

Obviously, this is probably happening already to a degree. I’m just starting with the simplest example.

#2: The Topic Participant

• A user discovers a file they would like to share under a Del.icio.us topic. (For example, a Sonic Youth track kifed from Fluxblog after he’s stopped hosting it.)
• The user uses a Del.icio.us+Torrent client to generate the metainfo file, which notifies the Del.icio.us tracker. The client uploads the metainfo file to a web hosting service.
• The link to the metainfo file is posted to Del.icio.us with title and description.
• The client software could allow downloaders to post the link to the torrent through their Del.icio.us account once they are done downloading. (The equivalent of “copy”.) First it would check for the availability of the tracker, though. If it is inactive, it could regenerate the metainfo and post a new tracker URL, following the steps above.

#3: The Aggressive

The Aggressive manages many different groups and files. Ultimately, he uses Del.icio.us as a complete file-sharing option. The primary obstacle to using Del.icio.us like that though is the lack of any title or description search. Perhaps the client could make up for it, but it’s a current lacking in Del.icio.us and I can’t say if it needs a search or not. You can’t really find any specific item except to hash its URL. And many things have multiple URLs.

So, I don’t know exactly where The Aggressive fits into this. Perhaps that’s OK. The Aggressive has so much already. eMule and Soulseek and all that.

Oh, the Possibilites

Adina Levin has speculated on Daily Show Auto-Torrents. Wired ran an article on RSS and BitTorrent, which focus on a Radio client for automating download of torrents on a feed. It’s just that none of this is really interesting without a compelling source for downloads.

Del.icio.us is perfect! The activity bred by competitive linking would be enhanced by the sharing of richer media. I’d really like to start a Fiery Furnaces group which would feed me bootlegs, tour photos, album reviews, whatever. I can unsubscribe when I loose interest, but until then I can be passive about what comes in.

Better client software is needed to make this happen. Uploads have got to be as easy as nutr.itio.us. But, yeah, that’s the idea right there.