2001 What's New

Also see Bitzi In The Press for outside coverage.

Latest changes appear at the top.

Friday, December 7: Updated Bitprint Encoding, New Bitcollider, Bitizen Popularity

• Bitprint encoding now complies with canonical Base32. Also, a period delimiter has been added between the sha1 and tiger tree components of the bitprint.
• Bitcollider 0.3.4 released. This version incorporates the aforementioned bitprint format change and a few minor bug fixes. The output of previous releases is still supported.
• A new statistics page with metrics for bitizen "popularity".

Wednesday, November 7: Two members of the Bitzi team presented today at the "O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer and Web Services Conference" in Washington, DC:

• Bitzi Founder and CTO Gordon Mohr presented "Bitzi and Open, Cooperative Metadata" (PPT slides).
• Bitzi Mayhem and Chaos Coordinator Robert Kaye presented "The MusicBrainz Community Metadata Project".

Sunday, November 4: Bitzi is pinching every penny to make it through these difficult times for media startups. For more details, see this posting in our general discussion forum.

Thursday, November 1: We've begun experiments with banner ads and affiliate programs. Expect constant tweaking!

Monday, October 15: Over 300,000 files catalogued!

Tuesday, September 18: A preview version of our freely-reusable OpenBits database dump, as RDF, is now available! See http://preview.openbits.org for details.

Saturday, August 24: Second update of the month!

• File detail display cleaned up. First in a neverending series of usability improvements.
• Minor Bitcollider update. Version 0.3.3 calculates the MD5 hash as supplementary metadata. (Bitzi continues to compose bitprints of the SHA1 and Tiger Tree hashes. We're now gathering MD5 hashes to support interoperability with systems that use this weaker identifier).
• One million tags in the catalog!

• Bitprints look a bit different. We've started using Base32 encoding, which is 20 percent more compact than the Base16 (hex) encoding we were using. The actual bitprints haven't changed, they're just displayed differently. Previous versions of the bitcollider that use hex encoding will continue to work.
• Bitcollider 0.3.2 released. This version includes a new image plugin that supports JPEG, BMP, and GIF files (contributed by delirium, thanks!) Also included are fixes for two crashes: an ID3v2 genre extraction problem, and submitting files from a compressed NTFS volume. This version now reports bitprints in base32 and also supports a new command line option for reading in submissions from a file.

• BitSocieties allow focused interest groups to catalog and discuss relevant files.
• Bitizen2Bitizen messaging allows bitizens to contact each other without revealing email addresses. You may compose a message to an arbitrary bitizen or follow the "Send <bitizen> a message" link on a bitizen's home page.
• Updated activity statistics for bitizens, tags, and files.
• Improved catalog peer review: file judgements.
• Passed 1,000 bitizen and 100,000 bitprint marks.

• Site Map and new header & footer navigation aids
• New tag types: "Broadcast Program" and "Relatable TRM" (audio fingerprint)
• Each user can retain a "hotlist" of favorite bitprints and remember a collection of other "interesting Bitizens"

• New look
• Revisions and additions to individual pages
• New versions of the Bitcollider utility, adding a graphical progress indicator on Windows, the capability to bitprint multiple files at once, and a plug-in architecture for extending its file-analysis capabilities.

Wednesday, February 28: A new version of the Bitcollider is available. This one identifies itself (when run with no arguments) as "Bitcollider/0.2.0 (b1006)", and properly extracts MP3 encoding and ID3 info for its lookup-submissions.