Podcasting via Bittorrent
When I was in school I always wanted to be popular. To be there with the "in crowd" and get that social recognition to push you up the ranks. But that never happened for various reasons (having a strong interest in PC's really does not help your case!)
But now I feel sorry for the popular people and wonder how they manage to survive the cost of that popularity. Imagine you're Adam Curry who has a huge fan base listening to his podcast. How on earth do they manage to keep up with the bandwidth costs, and what are you to do when your podcast starts to catch on and your provider is knocking on your door moaning that you are hogging the server.
The more popular you, or your show/file/article, are the more it costs you. That's why I found this this article, Battle the Podcast Bandwidth Beast with Bittorrent, quite interesting. Bittorrent is a great system for allowing large files to be downloaded with the bandwidth shared from many users.
I see that the current version of iPodder that I am using already has upload indicators but I cannot find where (or if) they are used. The great thing about most podcasting clients is that they load at system startup and scan for downloads at scheduled intervals.
Now if they were to add uploading support via bittorrent or another means then we really have a brilliant way to allow many more people to start podcasting - without worrying about the bill at the end of the month. Your podcasting client will sit there and server up bits of your already downloaded podcasts to other users. How cool is that?