Click on Read More for details about blog reviews, statistics, legal cases about the RNC demonstrations in New York, the civil rights of Muslims, and MPAA v SupraNova and what it means for Bit Torrent and Blog Torrent.

Today, I was reviewed in The Southern Lad. It was a positive review, in part, I suspect, because of shared political views. He did recommend cutting down on the white space in my blog. It is something I had been considering doing for a while, so I tweaked a few parameters.

Today, I received my 1500th Blog Explosion Mystery Credit, plus my 500th referral credit. Currently, Blog Explosion appears to generate about 7% of my traffic.

Yesterday, I received an interesting email. It pointed to this article about the first jury trial of a person arrested during the RNC protests back at the end of August. The case ended with charges being dismissed. This article jumped out at me because I was at the Public Library when Dennis Kyne was being arrested. I posted pictures of the event here, and an audio blog entry here. Many other cases had been dismissed before going to trial and new cases are being brought against New York City for wrongful arrest.

This provides an interesting contrast to a national poll conducted by Cornell University which reported that 44% of Americans favor ‘curtailing some liberties for Muslim Americans’. I suspect that many of the people would say that curtailing some liberties of protestors is also justified.

Other news of the day includes SupraNova, a popular Bit Torrent site, being taken down due to legal pressure from the MPAA.. I’ve not been to SupraNova, but I’ve done a little with Bit Torrent. People I know have talked about how important Bit Torrent could be in changing the models of distribution of audio and video over the Internet. People have often talked about using Bit Torrent together with Podcasting to vastly change the distribution paradigm. A problem with Bit Torrent, is that it depends on Tracker sites, and these sites are logical targets for groups like the MPAA.

The problem is, Bit Torrent can be used to distribute materials that aren’t covered by the MPAA, RIAA or other such organizations. As an example, small bands without a label distribute their material legally using Bit Torrent in an effort to gain recognition without becoming co-opted by the recording industry. Likewise, people distribute videos of personal interest that have no relationship to the MPAA. In my case, I have distributed many videos from the Dean campaign using Peer to Peer networking. I even got a notice from the MPAA last summer when they confused a video of a fundraising house party for the Dean campaign with an episode of E.R.

One hopeful development in the peer to peer arena is Blog Torrent I’ve tested Blog Torrent, and it isn’t ready for prime time quite yet, but it looks very promising. Essentially using Blog Torrent, you can set up a Bit Torrent Tracker site more easily than you can set up many types of blogs. If Blog Torrent takes off, sites like SupraNova get replaced by four million Blog Torrent sites. This will be especially good for small, legal uses of Bit Torrent, such as small bands distributing their material, political action groups distributing their material, or even for families sharing home movies around the globe.