It began when I started tinkering with Google Sites. I started an electronic portfolio of my technology skills. It's very incomplete, so I won't link to it. But it got me thinking...The idea of cloud computing is simple. We used to save stuff to a disk. Then hard drives got bigger and we accumulated lots and lots of stuff on our PC - documents, emails we were saving, pictures we'd taken, etc. The problem was that when we left home (or work, if they were there) we left without them. Those computer files stayed on a particular PC in a specific location.
Over the last few years portable memory has mushroomed. I remember when I got my first flash drive a couple of years ago. I was one of the first people at my work to have one. It held a gigabyte. I used to show it to the kids at school and tell them that it was about 870 of the little 3.5 inch disks everybody carried around. And they say, "wow!" Usually the word got drug out over three or four seconds...
As marvelously useful as the new USB plug-in drives are (I think I've got four of them now with a total capacity of six or seven gigabytes), I've realized that I store more pictures on Flickr already than I could carry around on all four of my flash drives. I show them to people - open a web browser and type in the address. I use them as images in my blog posts. I do other things with them. Where are they? They're out there... in the cloud.
I've started putting other useful documents online, like the trainings I've attended. I've populated a Google calendar with my upcoming appointments and life events so I don't need to carry a planner around. I've moved the links to important web addresses from my favorites in Internet Explorer to a Delicious account online. And the trend will continue.
My mindset has changed. My computer terminal is always connected. Why shouldn't I live life in the cloud? It's what comes next...
