When I made my New Year's resolution to watch CBC more often, there was something I was forgetting. Namely, TVO. Ontario's public broadcaster airs a show called 'The Agenda' weeknights at 8:00 (commercial-free), during which host Steve Paikin and various guests talk about political, cultural, or informational issues of the day.
Today was the first I had ever seen the show, and they were discussing Microsoft's attempted purchase of Yahoo!, 'Web 3.0', and the future of the Internet in general.
The main piece of practical knowledge I got out of this show was the revelation that the Internet (as in where all the Internet's data is stored) is now referred to by cutting-edge scholars as the 'cloud' (and if this post's title now seems groan-inducingly bad, you should have seen some of the TVO subtitles). This has prompted me to start referring to the Internet as 'the Intercloud'. I suggest you do the same; maybe we can get this to take off.
The main piece of practical knowledge Dan got out of this show was that goatees are awesome. I'm worried about him.
There was something else I got out of the show, though. One of the points reinforced most often was that this 'cloud' is essentially replacing personal computers - ten or so years ago, PCs were thought of as the new way to store personal data (and in the case of e-mail, correspondence). As it turned out, the 'armchair IT guys' using PCs at home didn't have either the knowledge or the time to keep that data safe, and viruses were constantly posing a serious threat to that data. Now, the data is stored in the 'cloud', which is maintained by people who work for Google or Amazon - in other words, people who know what they're doing, and know how to keep the data safe.
If you don't understand how this applies to you, think of it this way. If you use a web-based e-mail provider, such as Hotmail or Gmail, your e-mails are in the cloud. If you work for a business which uses Amazon's S3 platform, your work is in the cloud. If you use online banking, your financial information is in the cloud.
Or if you're willing to stretch the definition of 'cloud' a little further, most businesses, institutions, and organizations today have all their information stored on a central server. Although the person maintaining said server is generally part of the group in question, it could still be considered part of the cloud.
So as the TVO panel kept talking about this cloud, and how so much of our information is moving towards it, I was struck with a realization - information is the new food.
As ludicrous as that comparison may sound, at least hear me out on it. Once upon a time, humans were responsible for their own food - hunter-gatherer societies who would fend for themselves. Then somebody invented agriculture - and while these small-scale farmers were still forced to maintain their own sources of food, it was far more reliable than the troubadorian hunter-gatherers. Then came the invention of cities, and that leaves us with today's situation - while there are still some hunters and some farmers, the majority of people simply purchase their food from a grocery store, which has in turn purchased it from a manufacturer. The actually cycle of events is a little more complicated than that, to the point where the average person likely could not tell you exactly how food gets from its original source to their pantry.
Something similar seems to be happening with information. At one point, bills, letters, records, and the like were all kept in desk drawers and filing cabinets. The advent of personal computers changed all that - in fact, one of the major original selling points for home-use PCs was their capability of storing information. While people with PCs still had to look after their own information storage, it was now easier than it had been (the agriculture parallel). Now, the experts are predicting (and all evidence certainly suggests that they are right) that all information will move to this 'cloud', the inner workings of which people will understand no more than the food industry. Already, most people who use the Internet have trouble explaining to their parents (or grand-parents) exactly what it is, how it works from a functional perspective.
Another idea which was suggested on the show was that the 'cloud' will make personal computers irrelevant, and a 'computer' will simply be an interface which one can use to access and interact with the cloud. Blackberries and the newest iPods were cited as examples of computers already following a model similar to these 'cloud computers'.
There's a lot more that I could say on this subject (there are parts of the world where the food supply isn't as much of a guarantee as it is here, what would happen if the Western world suddenly experienced a severe shortage of, say, eggs? What if something similar happened to the cloud?), but I'll leave that for another time.
Just remember - and I don't think the person who coined this usage of 'cloud' ever thought of this - people don't like clouds. Clouds bring storms.
That said, there are a lot of really, really good things about the Intercloud.
--Ryan
No comments:
Post a Comment