With the falling price of storage space its no wonder that online storage has experienced a bit of resurgence. I like Mozy for backups, and I’ve used Streamload in the past as well. TechCrunch, of course, obligatorily weighs in today on how Streamload has partnered with an ISP to provide automatic backups.

Now Mr. Kirkpatricks’ post is short — and sweet. It doesn’t really offer a tremendous amount of opinion, or matter of contention. Yet — the second comment is quite fascinating.

Mr. Gio Hunt, the GM of Xdrive, yet another online storage solution, has popped up to chime in with his thoughts.

Xdrive is much more – it’s an online drive service. It’s like always having a network drive available, so you can get to your data and your files from anywhere using only a browser. There’s no client software required to use the service.

However, if you do download our Xdrive software, then you can actually mount the online storage as a real drive in Windows and drag and drop files to it and use it as if it were live storage on your computer. You can open and edit files directly from your “X:” drive. You can even upload your music to Xdrive and then stream it to yourself on any computer.

And you can’t really beat our pricing — 5GB for free. Period. Without any limitation on bandwith utilization. (Most of the other services out there which say they are free, including Streamload and AMD Live all put some limits on how much you can upload or download. But, Xdrive has NO limits on usage!)

Quite frankly, although they’re probably intended as being helpful, they come off as being an unsolicited ad for xDrive. Perhaps skirting into the realm of shameless self promotion.
What’s another word for that? Hmmmm.

Spam? How about “Spam”?

I haven’t been following TechCrunch’s comments all THAT closely, but for the darling of the new media emergence (i.e. “The Web2.0″), I’m surprised there isn’t a policy on this already. I wonder if other startups also haven’t leaped on the bandwagon and tried to make their case for their own work.

And if Mr. Arrington doesn’t quash this now, I wonder if it will be tacit implicit approval that anyone can make the case for their own works.

I suppose its a fine line between spam and self-promotion.

At the end of the day, I think it’ll be the community which is the final arbiter of this decision. If there is a high geek quotient amongst their members, I would caution Mr. Hunt to batter down his hatches – because he may have just bought himself an onslaught of potentially bad publicity.