R.I.P.: Intelligent Drone (iDrone)

Back a couple years ago, I embarked on a joint blog project with Mark of Doubting to Shuo and John of Sinosplice. This blog was named "Intelligent Drone" (or iDrone for short), and was meant to be a common place for all of us to put our blogs that related to technology. The theory was that the readership of a blog increases significantly if the posting is regular, and with 3 authors the posting would be roughly 3 times as often as 3 independent blogs. We all had the occasional technology blog, but these typically wouldn't fit very well with each of our individual blogs.

Over the years, we had a number of good stories, but the blog never really took off. I had a new baby, and never had the time I wanted for blogging. Both Mark and John still continue to regularly post to their main blogs and posted more often to iDrone than I did, but it wasn't too often. At the end, we invited a few guest bloggers, but it still wasn't enough to revive the interest in iDrone.

Then someone hacked DreamHost (the host for iDrone) and corrupted a bunch of pages with spam. John was never quite able to get iDrone back the way it used to be, and didn't want to devote the time to fix it.

The last nail in the coffin came just recently when the idrone.net name lapsed, and was bought by someone else who has posted two stories so far relating to license plates and things. It's not even quite clear to me that the new idrone.net is a real blog or some strange auto-content generation system. It doesn't allow posting comments, and each article is a short paragraph with a single link to a page that sells services of some kind.

To preserve the old stories for posterity, I will grab several of the old iDrone articles and post them here (based on the Google Reader cache). The next several stories on this site will be reprints of these articles.

For those who want to remember the old iDrone, please post comments here with anecdotes and anything else that might get you teary-eyed.

R.I.P. iDrone