Magnet Links

Magnet link looks like an inter­est­ing project.

Magnet links allow users to directly down­load large media files saving web­site cre­ators and blog­gers money on band­width costs and effec­tively prop­a­gat­ing files on p2p net­works that attract mil­lions of users per day.

They are sup­ported by the most pop­u­lar p2p appli­ca­tions includ­ing: Kazaa Media Desk­top, Limewire, Mor­pheus, Shareaza, Bear­share, Xolox.

It could be the best way yet to serve up files from a web­site that are, well, ever so slightly ille­gal. Since a Magnet link points your reader’s pre­ferred file­shar­ing appli­ca­tion in the right direc­tion, you don’t have to deal with band­width issues or worry about break­ing your host­ing provider’s terms and contitions.

Music weblogs could cer­tainly ben­e­fit by throw­ing in Magnet links along with reviews, fan­sites for TV shows could point to episodes along­side their episode guides. Shareaza, a Win­dows file­shar­ing app, is even dis­trib­uted via Magnet link. Throw RSS into the mix, and you have what Scott Ray­mond calls broad­catch­ing, as well as pain­less soft­ware updates for small devel­op­ers. Scott’s writ­ing with ref­er­ence to Bit­tor­rent, but it seems Magnet links have greater poten­tial, in that they take advan­tage of appli­ca­tions that most folk have installed and are famil­iar with, and there’s an instant, huge, user base. While Bit­tor­rent and Kon­spire already pro­vide alter­na­tive, bandwidth-​saving meth­ods of dis­trib­ut­ing con­tent - and I’m a fan of both - nei­ther are exactly pop­u­lar com­pared to Kazaa.

I would end this post with a brace of Magnet links point­ing you in the direc­tion of some of the songs I’ve down­loaded recently - keep an eye out for a live per­for­mance at The Metro, Kyota by eYe of Bore­doms fame - but there doesn’t appear to be a way of gen­er­at­ing them on OS X.

Luck­ily, there’s a couple of weblogs already on the case: Magnet Mix points to every­thing from inde­pen­dent short films to stock pho­tog­ra­phy and the works of Shake­speare, and Morle’s Mag­nets has recent posts offer­ing books on New­ton­ian Physics and Cold­cut tracks. Both, inter­est­ingly, favour con­tent released under Cre­ative Com­mons licences.

Posted at 10pm on 23/01/04 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
Permalink · Add to del.icio.us
Tags: p2p, web