I think Shareaza is wonderful - from the packet dump option to the ultrapeering, hashing, Gwebcache ability and so forth. Kudos.

What I like most about it is it's hashing ability - it's interaction with HUGE. I click on a URI (URL)
link on some web page (or in some e-mail, or on Usenet, or IRC, or an instant message, or whatever), and wa-lah, Shareaza pops open if it's not open already, asks me if I want to continue or download, and if I click continue, searches for and then starts downloading the file.

On a normal HTML web page, you can post these links. Because of the Gnutellaforums vBulletin message posting software, I can't post an URL that can be clicked through. It is cut and pastable from here however -

magnet:?xt=urn:sha1:HXHSJ6ATN3LQCCIOBGUEWV5FFCKP2K BL&dn=Noam%20Chomsky%20-%20Audio%20Book%20-%20Noam%20Chomsky%20-%20At%20Johns%20Hopkins%20University.mp3

Very cool. This has many positive aspects. You can look at Edonkey2000's Filenexus.com or Sharereactor.com to see where this can lead for Gnutella.

In fact, a site already exists for this, Bitzi.com. The only problem with Bitzi is it does not have direct links to the data like Filenexus and Sharereactor do with Edonkey. I am not sure if Bitzi does not place links with magnet or gnutella tags on it's pages purposefully or whether they will do that in the future. It is easy to create another web page and have two links - one to Bitzi and one into Gnutella (Shareaza) to find and download the file. Also, Bitzi has an open database policy, so if Bitzi ever went away, all the data it accumulated would still exist if people download the flat databse files that they share. Anyone is free to Bitzi's user-contributed database, as long as Bitzi is credited as the source of the data - they have a BSD type of free license.

So this is all very cool. I look forward to Gnucleus and other clients to implement this feature, and look forward to the web sites and so forth which will be replete, like Bitzi, with hashes, hash rankings, comments about hashes and so forth.