Cloud computing

Where things get really interesting, though, is in the home. The ability to program the World Wide Computer isn’t limited to corporations and other large organizations. It’s available to anyone with a computer hooked up to the Internet. Our houses, like our work places, are all becoming part of the computing cloud. Each of us now has a supercomputer, with virtually unlimited store of data and software, at our beck and call.

Many people are already programming the World Wide Computer, often without knowing it. A simple example will help show how. A man I’ll call Geoff is an aficionado of vintage Mustangs – he owns two and has helped restore many others – and a few years back he decided to share his passion with others by putting together a Web site. He registered a domain name, set up a server in a spare room in his home, signed up for an account with a local Internet provider, and bought an expensive Web-design program called Dreamweaver. His site was a bare-bones production – pages of text interspersed with some photographs, a couple of tables, and a handful of links to other mustang-related sites – but it took him a long time to get it looking good and operating correctly. Because changing or adding content was a hassle, he found that he rarely updated the pages. Not surprisingly, the site drew few visitors. After a few months, he got bored and abandoned his creation.

Recently though, Geoff decided to give it another shot. But instead of building a traditional site, he started a blog. Launching it was a snap. Using the browser on his PC, he signed up for an account at the blog publishing site WordPress. His blog was automatically set up on one of WordPress’s servers and assigned its own Web address. Geoff writes his blog entries in a browser window using WordPress’s software, which is running on computers owned by Automattic, the company that operates the WordPress service. Every time Geoff completes an entry, he click a “publish” button in his browser, and the software saves the entry on WordPress’s computers, formats it according to Geoff’s instructions, and publishes it on his blog.

Geoff didn’t want his blog to be limited to text, though. Using his cameraphone, he had recently made a short video of a big Mustang rally, and he wanted his blog’s visitors to be able to watch it. So he transferred the video onto his PC and, again using his browser, uploaded a copy to the YouTube video-hosting service. YouTube translated the file into a format viewable by any computer, and it provided Geoff with a simple cut-and-paste code for adding the video to his blog. Although the video is stored on YouTube’s computer, it plays through a window on Geoff’s site.

Geoff had also taken some photographs of vintage Mustangs with his digital camera. Wanting to share them as well, he uploaded copies to the Flickr photo-sharing site. He noticed, however, that the colors looked washed-out on screen. To tweak them, he went to another site, called Phixr, and launched its online photo-editing software. His photos were transferred from Flickr to Phixr automatically, and he used the Phixr tools to boost their color saturation and make a few other adjustments. He saved the changes, sending the enhanced photos back to Flickr. Flickr provided Geoff with another simple code that let him add a photo frame to his blog. The Flickr service feeds a new picture into the frame every few seconds. As with the YouTube video, the photos remain stored on Flickir’s computers, though they appear on Geoff’s pages. Geoff also noticed that a lot of other people had uploaded photos of old Mustangs to the Flickr site. He instructed Flickr to randomly insert some of those photos into his blog as well.

But he wasn’t done yet, a fan of sixties surf rock, Geoff decided he’d like to let visitors see what music he’d been listening to recently. So he signed up for an account with Last.fm, an online service that monitors the songs its members play on their computers and creates a customized online radio station tailored to each member’s tastes. Geoff instructed Last.fm to keep a Top 10 list of his most played song and to show the list in a box, or “widget,” in a column at the side of his blog. Last.fm updates the list every time Geoff plays a new song.

Geoff also wanted to let his readers know who else was reading his blog. He signed up with MyBlogLog for a service that keeps track of his blog’s visitors and lists their names – and even their pictures – in another widget. Finally, he wanted to allow his readers to subscribe to his writings. So he set up an account with Feedburner, which provided him with a “subscribe” bottom to add to his blog. Using the syndication technology known as RSS, Feedburner alerts subscribers whenever Geoff posts a new article, and it lets Geoff know how many people have signed up.

Geoff’s work, which only took him a few hours, gives a sense of how simple it’s become to draw data and services from various utility suppliers and combine them onto a single Web page. What’s remarkable is that he didn’t need to install any software or store any date on his PC – other than, temporarily, the original video and photo files. The various software applications, and all the data, reside on the utility companies’ systems. Using simple tools, he programmed all these far flung machines to create a multimedia experience for his readers. What’s even more remarkable is that Geoff didn’t pay anything for the software, the storage, and computing power, or the bandwidth through which all the data travels. Everything was free.

In fact, Geoff has even been able to make a little money from his blog by opening up an account with Google’s AdSense service. Google automatically places text advertisements on his pages, gearing the ads to the interests of Mustang lovers. Any time a reader clicks on an ad, Google shares the advertising revenue with Geoff. While he was at it, Geoff also signed up for a free account with Google Analytics, which monitors his traffic and provides him with detailed reports on who’s visiting his blog, what pages they’re looking at, and how long they’re spending on each page. Geoiff is tapping into Google’s vast data centers and enormously complex algorithms – again at no cost to him. ~ From Pages 119 to 121 “The Big Switch” by Nicholas Carr