A simple, old design for widespread blog mirroring

(Remembered this after last week's interview, and thought I would re-post it in case it makes any sense to anyone, assuming a few more interested people might be watching just now.)

Back at the Access 2004 Hackfest I worked with a few folks to design up a design for widespread copying and mirroring of blog content [1] for distributed-copy and "preservation" purposes. I think we came up with something that could definitely work, at low cost, on a wide scale. Rethinking it today I'd substitute Atom for RSS, and maybe rethink using METS [2] (perhaps instead just using Atom for both purposes).

It's a pretty simple idea: you extend an aggregator system to "archive" entries posted each day into bittorrent files, and then build a secondary system to turn the data distributed over bittorrents back into browseable "blog" mirrors if/when you need to. The best part is that you don't really need any new technology to do it.

[3]

The main drawback is that you're dependent on the quality and completeness of what you get in the source feeds to begin with, which isn't always good enough. But, I still think it could work.