"Bootstrapping the Long Tail in Peer to Peer"
“Bootstrapping the Long Tail in Peer to Peer”
Bernardo Huberman and Fang Wu from HP labs have just released a paper describing a way to help P2P networks deal well with niche content. “It is difficult to satisfy the diversity of demand without having to resort to client server architectures and specialized network protocols… We solve this by creating an incentive mechanism that ensures the existence of a diverse set of offerings regardless of content and size. While the system delivers favorite mainstream content, it can also provide files that constitute small niche markets which only in the
aggregate can generate large revenues.”