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More to love about S3

If you're already using Amazon's Simple Storage Servce (S3), you probably already know this, but I didn't so I'm pretty jazzed.

I'm using S3 at work and at Erieblogs.com to off-load some bandwidth from our respective networks. So far, I'm very pleased with the performance and the very low cost of the service.

Here's what I learned today. If you have a file in S3, you can access it from a browser or web page, but if you add "?torrent" to any URL, S3 and Amazon will automatically create a torrent file for you including a tracker. That way, you can seed the file and then let the BitTorrent network take over and handle file transfer. This would be incredibly useful for offloading large video files or other large files you want to distribute.

I was thinking this would be an interesting way to seed podcasts, but it seems like a lot of extra work for people to download a torrent, get the file and then play it. The iTunes model of subscription management and automatic file downloads seems to work just fine. Now, if iTunes would integrate BitTorrent into it's downloading of podcasts, that'd be cool. I'd help distribute "The Best of Mark Madden."