I think I mentioned before that I thought Filesharing or Peer2Peer or Music Piracy or whatever you choose to call it deserved a better portal site. Currently, if you’re looking for assembled news and views and discussion forums about filesharing, your only option is the acne clad Zeropaid site, which is well established and has good IT infrastructure but a pretty damn low IQ. There are a lot more downloads available there than real insight into the implications of those downloads. I think, more than ever, that distributed sharing of files between users has all sorts of interesting outcomes technologically and socially, and you could easily fill a copmuter screen with worthwhile thoughts on them if you had some (worthwhile thoughts). I would definitley want to read them if you did, and I think I’m not alone.

I’m starting to think I might be wrong. Not about wanting to read interesting thoughts, but about there not being anywhere to read them. I keep coming across academic articles on these topics, and wondering if there maybe isn’t a more academic website out there collecting them. I think I will hereby try and find it. I’ve been reminded of this stalled quest of mine by a couple of things. One is coming across yet another article that would be appropriatley housed (or at least linked to) by such a website: this rather technical article from the Technology Review, Pushing Peer-to-Peer , about the implications to internet structure of P2P mechanics. The second reminder is my discovery of two blogs which do about the same thing for their respective feilds as my imagined website would do for P2P: the Crooked Timber humanities (?) blog I linked to in my last post, and this great new Terra Nova blog about the societal and sundry implications of on-line gaming. That, plus maybe some downloads and discussion forums, is exactly what I would like to see exist for the p2p world. There is enough material coming out the Berkeley Schools of Journalism and Law alone to fill such a receptacle. I suspect I may just have not been looking in the right places. I will poke around and let you know.

ps. If you have a moment, poke around the Terra Nova blog. As Tony the Tiger would point out, it’s grrrreat!