Smarter Than Your Average

I haven’t talked about drop.io over here yet, although we’ve been raving about it over on Sidepodcast. It’s a relatively new service that I heard from someone who heard it from net@nite.

The idea is pretty simple. Sign up for an account, get 100MB for free, and start dropping. If you open it up, anyone can put in links, files and notes. The files could be pictures, audio, video, it’s pretty limitless. You can put a password in to make it more protected, and if you run over your 100MB, you can pay very little for more.

It’s almost genius.

I have to be honest and say I was sceptical at first. What would we use it for? I couldn’t really imagine. But now the Sidepodcast drop has been running for a couple of weeks, I see the brilliance.

We’re using it during race weekends, and people can drop in screenshots of the live timing, or captures from the world feed, anything that catches their attention. We had a brief spate of looking at a helmet design competition, and we had loads of designs uploaded to the drop so we could all have a look.

It simply adds to the community.

Then I decided to make my own drop, and have it as a sort of F1 lifestream. We’ve already fallen out with Twitter (that’s another blogpost right there…) so I’m looking for an alternative. I know drop.io must be relatively new because I got the name drop.io/formula1. I’ve been adding my thoughts, some pictures, some of my smaller shows, and links, and it’s fun and easy to do. I have a password so only I can post stuff but anyone can see it. It’s good and it works.

The one drawback: No comments. There are comments on files, but they are ridiculously hard to get to and it’s almost impossible to tell whether you’ve had a comment or not. Plus, there’s no way of seeing recent comments, no feed or anything, so you’d have to keep trawling through all your own stuff. It’s a drawback, but it’s not enough to make me stop using - yet.

So, go and check out drop.io and see if you can incorporate it into your blogging world!