Over at Engadget, Phillip Torrone has posted a couple of stories about how to get interesting content for his portable video player. The first one was about
"BroadCatching", term he coined to mean grabbing video content automatically from BitTorrent posts. The second one talks about "BroadSnatching", which similarly pulls videos referenced by blog entries.

Remember 1998, when everyone talked about "push"? People usually hunt around for content on the Web, then pull it towards them to consume. Push was going to revolutionize Web content by pushing it out to people automatically. It sounded great if you were an advertiser. As a consumer, you just knew that whatever came down, it wouldn't be very interesting.

Every other year, push comes back dressed in a new name. For a while, people were talking about intelligent agents. Little robots would go out on the Web and find content just for you. It's the same idea behind TiVO, except that the Web is not nearly as neatly organized as the channels on cable.

So here we go again. In this model—catching, snatching, whatever—your robot isn't intelligent. It just goes to a list of media and grabs it. The list is made by consensus. For example, Blogdigger is a search engine for blogs. It also provides several RSS feeds that list the last 15 links to media, divided by content type. There's a feed for Windows Media files, one for JPEGs, and so on.

These are files referenced by blog entries. It's content that bloggers are interested in right now. It's broadcast media with all the middlemen cut out. No one person is programming the lineup. No one vetos a particular piece. The producers put the content out, and as the giant focus group of the Internet looks at the content, the fascinating stuff floats to the top. At least, that's the theory.

In practice, you may see a lot of weird stuff. You might even see some Not-Safe-For-Work content. And there's a big difference between getting content from BitTorrent and Blogdigger. On the BitTorrent side, there's very little care for copyright. BitTorrent itself is not for piracy only, but many pirates use BitTorrent to trade movies or TV shows. Aside from possibly taking heat from the MPAA, the files on BitTorrent are huge—hundreds of megs huge.

On the Blogdigger side, the files tend to be smaller and not ripoffs of commercial content. You might see clips from TV shows, not whole episodes. You will also see video blogs, the equivalent of public access shows hosted on the Web only.

As average Net speed goes up, and more people create content, we will see more interesting content. We may have finally narrowed this push idea down to something practical.