Pipes plus feeds merged burning

Finally I have gotten around to doing two things: Feedburning my blog RSS feeds so I can see how many are subscribed and reading, and creating a personal plus-feed.

The first is done easily by visiting Feedburner, signing up, giving it the URL of your blog, create the feedburner feed and then modify your blog's settings to point at the new feed according to the instructions given. Nothing too hard. I should get myself into Technorati one of these days as well. However, what it it may mean is that I would love for you to re-subscribe to my blogs! If you are currently subscribed to my blogs in Google Reader or another blog-management tool, please subscribe to these new feeds (and we'll see if Blogger gets things right sooner or later as well):

• UncleCJs nerd-blog
  
• The Emigrant blog
  
• UncleCJs plus-feed

Secondly then, Christian Rudolf suggested me that instead of spewing URLs randomly, I should do like Doktor Spinn and market my "+1"-feed (a way of indicating something you like, you give it a point) as a great distillation of the mess out there on the web. Fine, but first I needed to put together my three different outputs of goodness then, my shared items in Google Reader, and pages tagged "cool" and/or "recommended" by me on del.icio.us. Yahoo Pipes did the trick, just sign in there with a Yahoo ID and you're good to go!:



Here's the end result: pipes.yahoo.com/unclecjpipes/plus (which I'd love for you to subscribe to at feeds2.feedburner.com/unclecjplus)

Finally, if you don't understand a thing of what I mean by "subscribe" above, please please please watch the video Google Reader in plain English beloew, your online life will be better with it and it's extremely easy to do:

And don't let the "blog-stress" grab you, remember that your blog reader should be "like a river of fresh water, from which you may drink now and then whenever you feel like it". Just let it flow.

Filesharing by subscription

Since long, I've been a huge fan of podcasts, to the point that I don't listen to much music during the days, there's just too much interesting podcasts I want to hear. This is all fine and dandy, except for video. I still get the Swedish news through "podd-tv", but what's offered as pod-tv is pretty limited, both because it demands a lot more resources to distribute and it seems content owners are a lot less relaxed about releasing video for download than they are about audio.

So, what to do if you want to follow The Daily Show, your absolutely friendliest and most amusing newscomedy show ever, you have a computer connected to the TV, you're hopeless about watching shows as it airs but there is no-one willing to offer what you want for legal download? Well, you circumvent it. If you imagine a podcast, that's an "RSS feed" but except for only being able to download a file linked from each item, your software downloads a .torrent metafile which is then used to download the actual file using P2P Bittorrent. It's called broadcatching, it is a super-cheap way for anyone to distribute content without buying all the bandwidth which would be necessary to provide the content to each of the clients. It's still a little bit messy, not many programs provide the feature, but it's very flexible and useful.

To get this straight, this won't plug into iTunes or your podcast software, but currently into your Bittorrent client. Several articles online suggest using either of several RSS plugins for Azureus / Vuze but since that was crashing and has become super-bloated since I last touched it, I prefer µTorrent even if that means running it under Wine (which to my surprise works excellently!).

What you need to broadcatch is of course some RSS feeds, for example those of the Pirate Bay. Pick the one of the category you want to watch, and here's the little quirk from regular podcasting, create a filter to catch only the content you're interested in, and just relax as your favourite shows arrive while you're sleeping! (Some shows you want to activate the downloads manually for, when there are duplicate or bad releases)

In other news, again proving Bittorrent as a strong option for distribution of large content when you just can't afford (or want to spend your money on something better) to pay for all the bandwidth, check out how the newly released Wikipedia Schools Edition DVD shares the load as it is released on Bittorrent.