Blog @ Digital Bazaar

Bitmunk 3.2.1 Released – Video and Data Sales

Bitmunk 3.2.1 was released this weekend, which included several bug fixes and the basis of two new really cool features.

While we were polishing the Bitmunk 3.2 release, we spent the time to make Firefox integration a bit cleaner:

• We now support Firefox 3.6.
• Only one tab is created for the Bitmunk Personal Edition software. That tab is focused whenever you purchase anything via Bitmunk
• Firefox will now auto-discover the page that you use to control your Bitmunk software.
• The interface has been made a bit more responsive.

Read on for more…

Monarch – Next Generation REST Web Services

Network-centric computing has been gaining significant mind-share over the past decade. We have started to shift our thinking of our computing environment from applications and documents that strictly reside on our personal computers to applications and documents that may reside on a variety of websites on the Internet. From Gmail, to Dropbox, to Facebook, to Twitter – the landscape of how we interact with computers is changing.

The companies that understand this shift to Web Services and build out technology to track this shift in usage will emerge as the leaders of the computing industry in the next several years. Their infrastructure will be a competitive advantage, specifically – how quickly and efficiently their developers will be able to grow their services while keeping costs down.

To help the industry take advantage of this shift, we have released Monarch as an open source project. Monarch is a state-of-the-art Web Services framework. It is used to build the core web services that a company will provide its customers. Scaling up and out while reducing costs will separate the market leaders from the rest of the pack – Monarch provides this competitive advantage.

Read on to learn more about Monarch.

Bitmunk 3.2 Launched – The Legal P2P Music Network

Today, we launched Bitmunk Personal Edition 3.2 – the first piece of software in the world to enable collaborative content distribution. Bitmunk is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser. This release adds the ability to sell DRM-free music from your computer, on behalf of artists, via an open, standards-based, peer-to-peer network.

We will be working toward standardizing this technology for web browsers over the next several years. This work will establish a world-wide, open mechanism for the distribution of digital content via web browsers that not only benefit artists, but fans as well. In short – when a file is traded using Bitmunk 3.2, the artist is paid and the fan is paid. You can legally resell the music you buy via the network and get paid for the bandwidth you contribute to the sale.

This is a bold new approach to music distribution. We certainly think it is inevitable that digital content will eventually be distributed in this way. Here’s how it works:

1. You find a song you want via the Bitmunk website.
2. You purchase the song using the latest Bitmunk Personal Edition software. When you buy a song on Bitmunk, the MP3 file pieces are downloaded from a number of P2P sources (just like BitTorrent). Unlike BitTorrent, getting commercial music through Bitmunk is perfectly legal.
3. The song that you bought, a DRM-free MP3, is added to your personal media library.
4. You are added as a download source for the song at a markup that you decide. Let’s say that markup is 10 cents.
5. When the song is downloaded from the network, you will get paid for each piece of the song that is downloaded from your computer. For example, if your markup is 10 cents, and there are 10 file pieces, you will get 1 cent per piece. So, if 5 pieces are downloaded from your computer, you will get 5 cents. If 7 pieces are downloaded from your computer, you will get 7 cents. While it may not sound like a great deal of money, there may be hundreds or thousands of people buying the song from you.

The artist will always get the royalties that they set for the song, but unlike all the major digital online music stores, you can get a cut of the sale as well.

We are really excited about this release as it is the culmination of years of research and development. Many tireless days, weeks and years of work have gone into addressing the many problems plaguing digital music distribution today. We think that getting the fans involved in the process of distributing music is at the heart of the solution and Bitmunk does just that – it gives people a reason to get involved and be rewarded for helping to distribute music on the Web.

If you would like to learn more about Bitmunk, take a look at the Introduction to Bitmunk page. If you’d like to try Bitmunk 3.2 out in Firefox, go to the Bitmunk downloads page.

Establishing an Open Digital Media Commerce Standard

This article outlines how Digital Bazaar, since 2007, has been using Semantic Web Technology to establish a set of open mark-up and communication standards for Web-based, peer-to-peer marketplaces. The system that Digital Bazaar has created, called Bitmunk, is used to transact digital media such as music, movies, television and books between independent agents on the Web. The decentralzied nature of the peer-to-peer marketplace requires flexible, open standards for communication and knowledge representation.

Read on to find out more…

First Editors Draft of HTML5+RDFa Published

This blog post was written by our Founder, Manu Sporny

HTML5+RDFa

The first public Editors Draft of RDFa for HTML5 was published earlier today. You can view the draft in two forms:

The blog post explains how this draft came to be, how it was published via the World Wide Web Consortium, and what it means for the future of RDFa and HTML5.

Read more (next page)…

Bitmunk 3.1 Released – Browser-based P2P Commerce

Today marks a significant milestone in the evolution of the Bitmunk peer-to-peer commerce platform. The software release that went live earlier today is the culmination of over 26 months of development, hundreds of thousands of lines of code writes and re-writes and the dream of a small group of us that are trying to fundamentally change the way people buy and sell digital goods on the Internet.

On the surface, Bitmunk looks much like a web-based digital content store specializing in MP3 music sales. People can come to the site and purchase songs and albums for very competitive prices (cheaper than iTunes and Amazon.com).

There is, however, a deeper history and a grander goal for Bitmunk. This blog post outlines why today’s software release is such a significant step towards that goal. We are creating an open, standardized, Internet-scale peer-to-peer commerce infrastructure for the purchase and sale of digital goods. This mechanism, dubbed Collaborate Content Distribution, would allow anything digital to be found, bought and then re-sold via your web browser. This technology shifts the purchase of music, movies, television, books, and any other sort of digital good from being a purely corporation-to-consumer experience to a peer-to-peer experience.

If we’re successful, Bitmunk will help bloggers, artists, writers, tweeple, actors, novelists, and many other people that produce creative and knowledge-industry based content to make a living doing what they do best, without all of the barriers to distribution that have existed to date.

It all started with Bitmunk 1.0… (next page)

Admitting that Javascript was a Mistake

There was an interesting article that was written by Guillaume Marceau recently about visually expressing the usefulness of programming languages. The article uses star-line plots to show how different programming languages compare with one another in speed and expressiveness, as each is used to solve a number of common problems. It’s always nice to check your gut reaction to different programming languages against empirical evidence. Language choice can be as varied as our food preferences, often not based solely on fact. Like our palate, we may find that our preference for our favorite programming languages change over time. As we learn more and use our language of choice to solve real problems, the initial love affair may turn into a nightmare.

At Digital Bazaar, our initial fondness for Javascript is turning into a deep distaste for the way Javascript has evolved in the browsers…

The Looming Cloud Computing Bubble

The number of stories in the online media about Cloud Computing has increased sharply over the last six months. There is a great deal of excitement around this new buzz word, but what is it all about?

The following graph is from Google Trends and shows the average news volume between the term “Cloud Computing” (in blue), and “Web 2.0″ (in red):

As you can see, the Cloud Computing news reference volume overtook Web 2.0 this month, which means that we’re well on our way to another technology bubble. The speed at which this bubble will grow is not known, but one thing is for certain – the media and the IT darlings have latched onto something that they are intent on hyping.

If the IT industry is not careful, we may end up over-promising and under-delivering on the latest tech industry promise of always-on, data-in-the-cloud, always-available computing services. Or worse yet, forgetting about vendor lock-in and forgetting why data portability is such a good thing.

You know those people that can spend an hour saying almost nothing at all? Well, that’s Cloud Computing. It has a good chance of doing just as much harm as good, much like what we went through during the early 90s vendor lock-in and the late 90s dot-com bust.

Read on to find out why Cloud Computing is mostly hot air…

Bitmunk 3.1 Website Launch

The Bitmunk 3.1 website quietly launched on Wednesday 8pm EST. This release comes six months after the Bitmunk 3.0 release and went a great deal more smoothly than the 3.0 release. The only major hang-up was an issue with IPv6 and DNS AAAA records, both of which we have disabled for the time being. We will bring the IPv6 side of our service back online when we have the time to work on the issue. Apologies for the handful of people that were hitting our website via IPv6.

This release contains fairly minor updates and bug fixes to the Bitmunk front-end website. WebBuy still looks the same as it did, but the entire back-end has been swapped out. The majority of the updates concern back-end web service updates, database updates and new P2P web services in preparation for the Bitmunk 3.1 peer-to-peer Firefox 3 plug-in release in the coming months.

Fibers are the Future: Scaling Web Services Past 100K Concurrent Requests (Part 2/2)

In a blog post last month, we outlined why a traditional Apache+PHP setup will inevitably fail the growing needs of medium to large AJAX-based websites. The article is continued this month by analyzing different methods of scaling web services past the concurrency barrier inherent in a basic Apache+PHP setup.

While speaking with the technical minds of several companies in our industry, there were several very good questions raised about assumptions we had made when building our system. The feedback from the first blog post about this topic revolved around the following two questions:

• Why would anybody need to scale to 100K (one hundred thousand) concurrent web service requests?
• Isn’t database layout and server bandwidth the primary scalability issue for web services?

We tend to forget that not everybody spends their time thinking about scaling to this level. Scalability requirements that are quite natural to us sometimes come off as exceedingly steep web service requirements to others. The questions above are ones that we have grappled with in the past. Here are the answers that we’ve found over the past several years through vigorous internal debate.

Important questions to ask when scaling past 100K connections…