Holy shit. It's been around for a bit but...

This shit really works.

I have about 1000 minutes of biz-related talking a month. That'll cost me $24 with skype. I can keep my cellphone restrained to when I'm actually on the go and not in front of my lappy, and for weekends and evenings.

And skype-to-skype calls are free, with up to 5-person conferences free also.

This is going to seriously fuck some shit up.

This is also why PHONE COMPANIES want to put toll-booths on your internet. Because they (or the cable companies that are all pushing their own digital phone service) don't want a competitive marketplace for these sorts of services. They feel that because they "own" the last mile network they should be able to extort a premium from other service providers. I say that all these networks were massively publicly financed and, hello!, I already give Time Warner $60 a month to have the internet on. I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want with that bandwidth, bitches.

Thanks to the responses from all and sundry on my torrent question. As suggested below, the Mime-Type is the issue.

I discovered that not only did I have to set up the type on the server side, but also force drupal to list the type in the enclosure field. In retrospect, this makes perfect sense.

Part of the problem is that drupal/php counts on the uploading browser, which doesn't really know about bittorrent, to determine the filetype. I experimented with overriding the default (application/octet-stream) and it seems to have worked. I've whipped out a little drupal module that works well in this context:

http://www.outlandishjosh.com/drupal/torrentfeed/feed.xml

Seems to load up right in Democracy and I/ON.

This is also using the Link element to provide Azureus-friendly feeds as well, although this probably has some bad side-effects in terms of making things clickable for context. I'll keep playing with it in the coming days and weeks.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback. I'll document this and try to spread to word.

Well, I've been excited for a while for the emergin BitTorrent/RSS "Internet TV" revolution, but apparently it's not ready for prime time. I just attempted what seems like a very rudimentary use case: creating an RSS feed with .torrent files in the enclosure field.

This is allegedly how the tech is supposed to work in Democracy, Fire Ant and I/On. These are all still "beta" tools, true, but RSS enclosure + bittorrent (essential to low-cost mass distribution of content) is supposed to be at the heart of their purpose. It surprised me that none of them detected the torrent. The system apparently doesn't work.

Also, the Azeureus torrent program -- the tool for "power users" -- fails to recognize the enclosure field, but I was able to hack in support by including a link to the .torrent file in the link field, which seems a little odd but apparently is how their RSS plug-in is written.

Kinda diappointing all around. This idea has been floated for almost two years now, and I know there's actuallly been money sunk into it. It should work by now.

Season two of Battlestar Galactica concludes. Well, that's certainly a lot of plot advancement in one episode. And with some paraphrasing from Mario Savio too:

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

That's right in there. That's part of what makes this show so enjoyable to me.

The artist in me likes that the new format of the serial drama gives creators the liberty to make big narrative moves. It's like soap operas, but less slapdash, and maybe eventually about something. Of course, there's always the pitfall of just becoming a series of climactic plot reversals -- really just becoming a high-budget soap opera -- to such an extent that the whole point is lost. But there's an opportunity there too, a potential reward for the risk; keeping the drama fresh and exploring themes that are grander in scope. We'll see how this turns out.