Podcasting: Here we go again
We're just starting to cope with the scalability problems in RSS, and meanwhile, the guy behind RSS (Dave Winer) is talking about podcasting:
Also, per Steve Kirks' request, I plan to do a weblogs.com ping center for podcasts. In other words, a simple infrastructure is need to cope with the new flow, which is a great problem to have, and one we know how to deal with after experience with weblogs.
The problem with RSS is that aggregators are pinging your server every 15 minutes, or hour, or however the clients are configured, and if you have a million readers, it means a million pings every n minutes.
Now, on top of that, if you're a podcaster (basically recording audio clips to attach to RSS items, that get downloaded automatically to your iPod or other MP3 player, hence the name), when you make a new audio clip available, every aggregator is going to be downloading it directly from your server in the next hour or so.
This would be a great time to promote BitTorrent as a method of distributing RSS enclosures, or another peer to peer architecture, otherwise podcasting is going to fall over pretty quickly, and only folks with serious bandwidth are going to be able to publish.
It's not a hard problem to solve..