Spotting shapes in information clouds

A creatively written article from Wired describes the “Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you'll ever use.”

The article describes Google's search for cheap power for their giant data centres and touches on others like Sun and Ask.com. It raises some interesting new paradigms in computing, such as electrical power being more scarce than processing power and time being more precious than money.

It's perhaps interesting to include a mention of Amazon's own EC2 or “Elastic Compute Cloud” and S3 or “Simple Storage Service” which allow you to pay for remote storage and bandwidth. It's also interesting to note Microsoft's shift towards the new “Live” brand and their move into Software as a Service, all before Vista is even out of the door.

This could all be passed off as just another spin on “the network is the computer”, but things certainly seem to be speeding up around here. You have to wonder whether the concept was just before its time, and now the infrastructure is catching up, the real fun is starting.

An aside…

With all these clouds around, I've created an experimental “tag cloud” of my own. It sits on the right hand side of my homepage and represents the topics I'm currently writing about.

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