This is pretty recent on the new technology radar. What happens when you combine RSS subscriptions and BitTorrent P2P? Broadcatching, a way of subscribing to a channel which pushes content such as pdf, audio, and video to your computer. Andrew Grumet reports that

When I logged in this morning there was a BitTorrent window open and a copy of Free Culture on my hard drive. Simon put this Creatively Licensed work on LegalTorrents, and the Radio plugin did the rest. What a pleasant surprise! I seriously doubt I'll have the patience or motivation to read the whole thing sitting at the computer, but the chances that I'll go out and buy a dead trees copy just went up significantly.

Certainly, ubiquitous use would require ubiquitous broadband access, but imagine--in an open content/open access world of course--if upon registering for a class, students subscribed to an RSS channel for that class which would automatically push all the course materials and handouts to them (this would be especially handy for online courses). Or suppose as scholars, we created an RSS channel for computers and writing and shared open access journal articles and other files among colleagues, a channel which would continually update our hard drives as new material was found by anyone in the group?

So keep an eye on this technology. It's not only an excellent example of legal application of P2P, but one with a lot of potential. More on broadcatching at The Importance of.

Side note: I've added a P2P topic category for Kairosnews and updated some of the older posts to be included in it.