Michael Jackson's music flooding the p2p networks; The artist more alive than ever

It’s become clear for everyone that, like it or not, the echoes of Michael Jackson’s death will linger on for quite some time. We deal we p2p so for us the first source of information in this direction, or the place to get clues from are, of course, p2p networks and they are the ones that point to what I said above.

Brand Asset Digital, the distributed technologies company (P2P search marketing, P2P live streaming and P2P business Intelligence), announced yesterday that search demand concerning all most important P2P protocols for Michael Jackson and related terms have gone considerably past 250 million global queries with an estimation of 4 billion impressions on those searches since the artist passed away on June 25th 2009.

According to P2Panalytics™ report, in the two weeks since the singer shocked a whole world with his premature death, file sharing demand of his music has climbed actually more than 100 times that of the reported 2-3 million downloads of songs and albums on Itunes and digital download stores based on data coming from SoundScan (Nielsen Soundscan).

"The explosion of demand and engagement across P2P for Michael Jackson is unprecedented. We've have been tracking the related demand of search queries and impressions as well as behavioral intelligence across all the major P2P protocols with P2Panalytics™", revealed Joey P. Brand Asset Digital Co-Founder, "Since June 25th the data has crushed any comparable major music or major film release we have ever seen across P2P. It is demand like this which continues to demonstrate why the P2P space is the next frontier of eyeballs for Search Marketing advertisers with technologies like P2Pwords™ (SEO and SEM both) to capture and leverage searches, impressions and clicks the same way Google did with Adwords™ on web search."

To give you an idea of how big this thing has become and its continuous growth, Missy Hogan Brand Asset Digital's Head of Operations made further statements: "To see the daily demand go from a few hundred thousand queries a day to well over 20mm a day is more demand than any music, film, video-game, software file or search term we have ever encountered. We believe based on this growing trend that by the end of July Michael Jackson demand may break 1 Billion Search queries alone within a one month time frame making the estimated impression number across all P2P Search close to or well over 20 Billion Impressions."

As you’ve probably noticed by now P2POn also takes the time to check out what’s new out there in terms of cutting-edge devices developed with integrated support for Bittorent. TVBLOB Box is such a device - a dual DVB-T tuner designed for digital television Internet access. The device offers a simple URL entry field PVR with internal hard drive which comes with 160 GB built-in storage BitTorrent support that enables effective content download/distribution and much more.

The site explains how it works: “For starters, the BLOBbox, besides being an HD PVR free Digital Terrestrial TV, lets you browse YouTube and Picasa, do Google mail or watch online television. You can subscribe to podcasts, search and download BitTorrent feeds to view video in 1080p on an HDTV, and copy or stream media files from a home PC or local network. For the first time, Web 2.0 social networking is integrated, including services like Facebook, TV-to-TV socializing and virtual couch sharing. Most importantly, you control everything via your television and remote control.

To use it, you simply plug it in to your television and your broadband connection. You will have immediate access to the services mentioned, as well as new TV services made by us or anyone else as they become available.”

The main features of TVBLOB Box:

• Dual DVB-T tuner: for access to digital television
• Internet access: with simple URL entry field
• PVR with internal hard drive: with 160 GB built-in storage
• Torrent support: for efficient content download/distribution
• Podcasting with automatic download: using HTTP, FTP or torrent delivery methods
• Streaming from PC to TV: using UPnP automatic discovery
• Additional box control from PC: via web pages; uses auto-discovery in the Home Network and TVBLOB services for access via the Internet
• Personal Download Manager: using HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent delivery methods
• File Uploader: via HTTP and FTP
• USB storage support: with playback and file management

YouTube has always tried to keep up with the users’ needs. A new improvement has been announced as the service extends the video upload size from 1GB to 2GB so that users can more easily upload HD videos to the site. While this was also possible before, it involved a more complicated method and the new update is meant to allow these large uploads directly. The only hard work users have to engage in is add &hd=1 at the end of the video’s link. This being said, just go ahead and share that nice HD you have with the world!

CakeTorrent is a new torrent site addressed to those who want to download but just don’t get along with new technology and simply want that done without needing to learn basically…anything. BitTorrent as simple as it gets - without having to download .torrent files or browse torrent sites. The best thing for less knowledgeable users – there’s no need to even install a BitTorrent client on the home computer! How ‘bout that?!

Basically, the site is a download solution merging two separate services: torrent searching and browser downloading through BitLet.org. FileShareFreak details the process: “BitLet doesn’t incorporate torrent searches: users still have to download actual .torrent files and then upload them to the webapp, or copy/paste a working URL of a torrent metafile from an indexer such as Mininova or Isohunt. This in itself increases the overall learning curve of the BitTorrent protocol + BitLet, something that CakeTorrent remedies with the integrated searching. Simply search and download straight into BitLet”.

Oh, I forgot to mention – the service is, of course, free.

Below we offer you several links to where you can watch the memorial of what has become a “living legend” as many (famous and anonymous) voiced yesterday and feel a more real vibe courtesy of mashable.com:

1. Ustream / CBS – with live chat and Twitter integration using SocialStream, Ustream offers a totally interactive way to view (widget embedded below).
2. Facebook / CNN – Join CNN Live and you can chat live about the event with your Facebook friends.

3. MySpace – If MySpace is your chosen venue, there’s community comments and you can watch MJ videos as well as the live stream.

4. MTV

5. Twitter keywords “MJ’s” or “MJ memorial” – these appear to be the chosen phrases of the Twitter community to group around the event. You can also search for these phrases to see what others are saying.

In death just as during his life the “King of Pop” remains the best selling artist – only this week Michael Jackson sold 2.6 Million downloads (and just to give an idea of how big that is – know that no musician has ever sold more than one million digital songs in one single week).

R.I.P. MJ!

BT has followed the trend of several other companies offering incentives for part-time work

Trying to deal with financial crisis takes various forms – one of the largest British ISPs, BT, has made a recent announcement concerning its employees who will be offered the chance to take one year off from their regular jobs  and have 75% wage reduction.

The company promises any employee willing to accept the one-year vacation the rest of 25 % of their salary as an upfront payment.

Like many other companies BT financial situation has suffered a lot (reportedly, 1 billion pound loss) over the last year and now, the internet service provider wants to cut as many costs as it possibly can.

The telecom has also announced it will let go over 15,000 of its current 100,000 employees in 2010. Part-time work is also greatly encouraged.

The episodes could be available on PS3 as well

GTA fans will surely love this – two new DLC episodes of their favorite game (Grand Theft Auto IV) will be released next year by Take-Two and Rockstar. GTA V will see its release in 2011.

GamesIndustry.biz has published an interview with video game analyst Todd Mitchell Mitchell who said that the DLC episodes could be extended to PS3 this time and not launched only for Xbox 360.

"I would expect that there would be two more pieces of downloadable content for GTA IV, that's what has been indicated to me, although formats are unsure. It's been indicated to me to me that would be the case," explained the analyst.

Talking about the new GTA release (expected in 2011) Mitchell suggested that a new GTA title for the veteran PS2 will be also considered.

"Coming out of E3 there was no commitment to a new Grand Theft Auto, and I think that's because of Rockstar's track record with delivering on time," he said.

To wrap up he pointed out that "Of the three, I'm least confident in saying for sure there will be a new GTA for PlayStation 2, but the track record shows that PSP titles have been repositioned [on PS2]."

'Watchmen' - from the creator of '300'

TorrentFreak has published the data they collected with the top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent for the week ended July 5th. All the films included in this chart are DVDrips (unless mentioned otherwise).

This week’s leader is ‘Watchmen’, your regular action-drama-sci-fi-thriller combination, with the last week’s Sci-Fi thriller ‘Knowing’ coming in second and the newcomer ‘Streets of Blood’ ending the trio. The latter is an action thriller with an assorted casting – next to Val Kilmer and (former?) Hollywood sex-icon Sharon Stone, you can watch rapper 50 Cent switching profiles (or trying to act some would say) as singers' (and especially hip-hopers') appetite to launch their talents into the movie industry as well seems evergrowing.

Within a few days since its worldwide DVD debut on BitTorrent the film had more than half a million downloads.

It was only to be expected that news of The Pirate Bay’s looming sale would cause uproar among the p2p communities across the world. At the opposite pole media companies and copyright owners jubilate at the thought that world’s largest BitTorrent tracker will no longer cause them sleepless nights. Still, as history has proved before, file sharing has long ago surpassed the mere existence of one or several popular file sharing sites which means that when the ‘death’ of one of those occurs, the phenomenon in itself is not affected and people share jus as much content as they had up until that moment. Moreover, the tendency is often to have that ‘absence’ complemented by new more competent systems.

When Global Gaming Factory (GGF) announced a week ago that it will acquire The Pirate Bay for $7.8 million, the matter received great media coverage. Lots of it has been focusing these days on how feasible will be the deal after all for GGF since the Pirate Bay users' renowned loyalty may become something of the past with the new owners taking over the site. A dramatic reaction from the pirates has been already reported by The Register which says that TBP became “flooded with account deletion requests” from very upset users at learning about the deal.

Besides that, the company is currently facing an insider trading investigation due to an incredible increase of its stock in trades exactly one day before the announcement of the agreement was made. “There are reasons to suspect that information was leaked,” commented an official at the Swedish AktieTorget stock exchange.

But that was Herskowitz’s old job – what’s he doing now? Well, let us fill you in on that also - he is no less than the VP of product management at LimeWire, a top p2p file-sharing service that has survived lawsuits and virtually about any legal issue thrown at this type of services, still enjoying great popularity and lot and lots of downloads.

Herskowitz has announced his new job on his blog and I’m just picturing the faces of his former employers. Priceless!

Meanwhile, LimeWire does what it was meant to do - allowing users to search and download whatever makes their day (from songs, movies, to applications) over the Internet for free, and does that without compensating any record label. Of course, when you do try to download a copyright protected track (not that I would have tried) a prompt warning from the service does pop up telling you what you’re about to do. After all, he who would disconsider such a message must be the ultimate villain, right?