We're just starting to cope with the <a href=http://www.stevex.org/dottext/archive/2004/09/09/614.aspx>scalability problems in RSS</a>, and meanwhile, the guy behind RSS (Dave Winer) is talking about podcasting:<p> <i>Also, per Steve Kirks' request, I plan to do a weblogs.com ping center for podcasts. In other words, a simple infrastructure is need to cope with the new flow, which is a great problem to have, and one we know how to deal with after experience with weblogs.</i><p> The problem with RSS is that aggregators are pinging your server every 15 minutes, or hour, or however the clients are configured, and if you have a million readers, it means a million pings every n minutes. <p> Now, on top of that, if you're a podcaster (basically recording audio clips to attach to RSS items, that get downloaded automatically to your iPod or other MP3 player, hence the name), when you make a new audio clip available, every aggregator is going to be downloading it directly from your server in the next hour or so.<p> This would be a great time to promote BitTorrent as a method of distributing RSS enclosures, or <a href=http://www.stevex.org/dottext/archive/2004/05/14/412.aspx>another peer to peer architecture</a>, otherwise podcasting is going to fall over pretty quickly, and only folks with serious bandwidth are going to be able to publish.<p> It's not a hard problem to solve..Thu, 01 Sep 2005 19:17:07 GMT