I scoured chomskytorrents, and a bunch of other filesharing services (I don't know if I'm allowed to list them here), and I ended up with a massive Chomsky collection of books, speeches, talks, interviews and audiobooks. It's about 21GB in size, 205 hours of content, with ~135 hours of audio and ~70 hours of video.

Would anyone be interested in this?

The best thing you could do is create some sort of list.
It all depends on what you have.

Some people would go nuts for the docs.
Some people would want the lectures.

Maybe taking screen shots of your download-folder would be quicker than typing out a list. You could upload the screenshots, and post them here.

We'd all be able to have a peek, and see if such a huge download is worth it.

If it's easy to separate you could also divide it in several torrents. One for audio, one for video for example.

Whatever you do, don't put it in a .rar or something like that. People can choose what they want to download if it's in their original files.

Sounds like an idea. I have been thinking about the same project myself, seing as the old chomskycollection probably lacks alot of recent items, I believe it's at 9GB or something. If you asked a year ago most people would probably say "20GB are you nuts?" or "I only want this one mp3", but by now the size isn't a big deal and most people (and torrent clients) have learned to pick what files to get out of a torrent.

Alternately you could separate Video and Audio. And like Pangaea said, don't rar/zip anything, makes it alot harder to keep seeders.

is this going to be made available, i have some chomsky but not enough! and its all kinda scattered as random clips...i'm currently tring to download a mit lecture (the new war against terror) but there doesn't seem to be any seeds or something..whatever it needs t download anyway its not got so it'd be good to get some fresh torrents uploaded...

I'd send you a few bucks if you'd mail it over. And then I could seed (some) of it nightly... otherwise it seems like it'd take way too long to grab...

escobar wrote:Maybe taking screen shots of your download-folder would be quicker than typing out a list. You could upload the screenshots, and post them here.

You could also let the computer generate the list:

dir /s /o >list.txt

Just move into the directory with the cd command and then run the command above. It will create a list of everything within that directory and direct the output into a file called list.txt

Aldrian wrote:"I only want this one mp3"

Azureus allows me to chose only the files that i want... i don't know about other clients.

But i think it's still better to break a torrent like that up in pieces.

Hell yeah! Then there would really be the One Big Torrent!

there is now a 45GB version listed, but has a problem with 2 files in it matching the torrent hash...

is there a good way to build on such a data base, adding new material without re-downloading everything, just the new stuff?

iow, can it point to a standardized download folder and compare contents and hashes to see if the user already has matching files then skip them if so?

Another two weeks and this one should be ready to roll >>

https://onebigtorrent.org/phpBB.php?page=viewtopic&f=6&t=3238

There are many files which most people will have already, but once completed should provide enough new and archived material for downloaders to select the files they want and when.

It will be seeded to infinity.