Werner Vogels and his CS students at Cornell are working on a project that could change the way that people collect, report, and view news. Here’s a snippet from the abstract/intro:
The NewsWire project is to deliver a peer-to-peer system for collaborative real-time delivery of news items through a publish/subscribe interface. The systems is build using the Mariner system from the Astrolabe tool suite, a versatile tool for ultra-scalable and secure distributed state management. Astrolabe uses epidemic techniques and information aggregation to achieve the scalability and robustness needed.
It caught my eye at first because it sounds similar to NetNewsWire, but the project has a very high cool factor on its own. Here’s another snippet I like:
Our premise is that current push solutions fail to take advantage of the collaborative power of the Internet. The solutions are often proprietary, and employ a one-to-many model where the producer is expected to deliver “personalized” content directly to each of the consumers. The approach clearly has scalability limitations. Yet despite these problems, there has been little activity by publishers of the many real-time news sites to provide a coordinated solution for this problem. We believe that the time has come for an Internet-wide infrastructure for efficient real-time content delivery.
I have subscribed to Werner Vogels’ RSS feed to keep up with the project and the other stuff that he’s working on/thinking about. I think I originally found a link to his blog from Peter Drayton.
