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Hi Gordon,Hope I’ve got your email right…I really enjoyed your interview with Klaatu – I thought I’d share my thoughts with you about what I think about regarding the importance of content.Firstly can I say that I think your idea to provide certified “Safe” torrents is brilliant. I think that torrents have suffered (as a technology) by the bad press that the illegal use of the technology has generated. I think this is an opportunity to bring it back, and make it a force for good again.I’m an ubuntu user – an I’m writing a series of articles for my blog which discuss an idea that I’m trying to champion, packaging content for inclusion within the distribution. It seems to me that certified torrents (safe torrents) could be a fantastic solution for larger files.

When we download a distro, we get access to the repositories, and we get all kinds of choice. Ubuntu supplies an element of infrastructure surrounding applications in the form of the repositories, but when you want to read a ebook, or listen to some music you’re pretty much out on your own. The (as yet un-named) CCTracker provides a mechanism by which distros can start to offer content along with applications. I think this is an opportunity for distros to start to compete not only in terms of applications, but in terms of content – and when you see how popular tablets are, then supplying content could make one distro to start to look better than another -

Imagine a mythbuntu distro that also has video content – that content could be supplied through software centre (but actually supplied by a CCTracker torrent). As regards to torrent machines hosting canonical torrents, could this be accomplished by using Amazon Computing cloud? Could we use the power of boinc to create a distribute torrent stream?

Thanks -

Mike Hingley.

Hi Mike,Yeah you got the email right, I should have thought of the show notes for the episode but forgot, so they were hastily drawn up at the last minute, leaving out my email and the tracker info page. Thanks for the feedback.The idea of being able to use the tracker as an efficient backend for content is a step further than I’d thought of but I like it. This is why a community of people is better than one individual. Both cobra2 and myself thought it’d be great to be able to subscribe to a torrent feed for new episodes, instead of a direct download feed. That was as far as we got on that.I like the idea of having an iTunes (for want of a better name) for free & legal content with the tracker as the delivery mechanism, with a few alterations. I want everything originating from this project to be as non-discriminatory as possible, as well as being standards based, with a policy of not reinventing the wheel.

The Ubuntu software centre is pretty decent, but it’s done in a way that’s not exactly easy to port to other distros, specially those not based on Ubuntu or Debian. It’s also a standalone application.

I think a standalone iTunes type of application may be overkill, although I’m open to being convinced. My initial instincts are that it’d be better as APIs allowing existing projects like Miro to add that functionality in. That way people can use the applications they like using, and get that functionality. This also allows devs on projects for Windows and OSX to make the content available to their users.

This is just my initial thoughts on an excellent suggestion. It’s something for later on. The plan is to hold the naming suggestions open for about one month after the HPR interview was released, narrow down and choose names. At that point we move on to getting domain names and setting up the site, including forums. I’d suggest at that point you could join the forums and lay out your suggestions for the others to comment on, build upon and refine.

Gordon