[a revolution in mass-scale content distribution]
|
|
the power of broadcast
[a revolution in mass-scale content distribution] |
|
konspire2b is like: a blog with unlimited bandwidth blogs are software systems that allow you to easily post a series of documents to your website over time. Many people use blogs to display daily thoughts, rants, news stories, or pictures. If you run a blog, your readers can return to your site regularly to see the new content that you have posted. Before blogs came along, maintaining a website (and updating it regularly) was a relatively tedious process. Some might call blogging a social revolution---even if you do not buy the hype, you must admit that blogs are causing quite a stir. kast is similar to a blogging system in that you can use it to regularly "post" new content to a group of readers. Of course, a blog, like any website, has limited bandwidth. Thus, the kinds of content you can post to a blog are usually limited to text and pictures, especially for popular blogs that are read by many people. By leveraging the distribution power of konspire2b, you can use kast to post files of any size to essentially as many readers as you want. on your blog, you might have a "picture of the day". On your konspire2b channel, you can have a "movie trailer of the day" or even a "gnu/linux distribution of the day". Bandwidth limitations are essentially taken out of the equation. and, thanks to kast's web-based user interface, you can use HTML comments to describe each broadcast and link back to relevant information on the web. In fact, the layout of kast's "received folder" interface almost looks like a blog. a free radio or television station using konspire2b, you can run a multimedia channel that reaches a large audience. As with any broadcast system, your receivers need to be "tuned in" (with their kast nodes on and subscribed) in order to receive particular broadcasts. However, as long as your receivers have their nodes on during your broadcast, they can interact with the received content later at their leisure. For video distribution, this makes konspire2b more like TiVo than ordinary television. Also, with konspire2b, you are not just limited to sending audio or video: you can send any kind of file. of course, radio and television stations are expensive to own and operate. konspire2b is completely free to obtain and use (ignoring the cost of a basic internet connection). an unforgeable chain letter chain letters have existed for a long time, possibly even as long as letters themselves. Everyone is familiar with the general idea: upon receiving the letter, you send copies of it to a small number of friends. Eventually, the legend goes, the letter will reach everyone in the world. Many chain letters (especially since the advent of email) simply annoy the people that receive them. however, if you want to send a letter to 100 friends that all want your letter, using the chain letter mechanism is not a bad way to distribute the effort. You could either duplicate and send the letter 100 times yourself, or you could send out copies to 5 friends and have them to help you reach the rest of the group. Each person does a small bit of work, and everyone gets the letter that they want. konspire2b is quite a bit like this "good" use of the chain letter idea. Also, konspire2b uses digital signatures: your 100 friends can be sure that the letter really came from you and was copied correctly. |
