Not Everything Will Move To The Cloud - Forbes.com. Cloud Training Links for Computers In Libraries 2010 (Training I. The gathering storm. Got an Hour? Create a Server in the Cloud - ReadWriteWeb. Dave Winer yesterday announcedEC2 for Poets, a step-by-step guide to help you create a server on Amazon’s EC2. His how-to is so easy to understand that we had our own server up and running within the hour. Sure, it may not seem like much that this fairly uninteresting page is sitting out there somewhere, but for this writer, it was an amazing coup. “It’s time to stop thinking about these servers as being things for geeks and start thinking about them as things for people with ideas,” Winer said in a podcast roadmap he created for this work.
The technology available today is enabling anyone with even the slightest technical bent to get out there and create amazing new things; often taking the technology in directions than the company which created it could have ever imagined. We went through Winer’s HowTo: EC2 for Poets, and within 20 minutes had set most of it up. But for two instances, it went smoothly.
In step 12 of launch your server, Winer explains. Cloud Based Twitter Search is Great for Searcher's Block. Ever wanted to search for something, but you weren't sure exactly what? Sounds like an oxymoron, but it does occasionally happen, especially if you're searching through Twitter conversations. For example, you might want to know what people have been saying in conjunction with the phrase "I'd like to. " Or, you want to see what keywords would go well with "social media? " Cloud.li is a cloud-based Twitter search engine that provides you with a list of commonly used keywords and phrases for another phrase, in cloud form. Type in "Mashable" and you'll get a cloud of keywords, those most prominent being the biggest in the cloud; in this case, those are "social, media, facebook, behavior, user, change, etc. " Now, click on any of those words and you'll get a Twitter search for the chosen word plus the keyword "Mashable.
" Google Drive Rumors Flare Up Again - ReadWriteWeb. For years people have speculated that Google would use some of its incredible capacity to offer dedicated online data storage, something like a “Google Drive.” Hints that such a project is in the works have popped up time and again, but some interesting new ones have emerged lately.
Why would you like a Google Drive service? For the presumably very low price point (free?) , for the ease of backing up important data or for the potential integration of stored data into other powerful Google services? There’s lots of reasons to perk up your ears when rumors like this pop up. Greg Sterling sums up the latest rumors on Search Engine Land this morning. GMail As Possible Home for GDrive Gmail Product Manager Todd Jackson told Webware last week that: “We know people’s file sizes are getting bigger. That’s all well and good, and we know that Gmail already does a lot of storage. Picassa Hints Security Concerns It’s a vexing situation. Do you want a Google Drive?
We’re Not All Ready for the Cloud Yet. Michael Stephens has a great post describing his Ten Trends & Technologies for 2009, and normally I wouldn’t even point to it because it’s getting a lot of link love elsewhere. If by some miracle you haven’t seen it yet, go read the whole thing, but I want to expand on one particular piece, cloud computing, because librarians need to also discuss the flip side of the benefits that Michael describes. As he notes, Michael isn’t the first librarian to talk about cloud computing, but I haven’t seen as much discussion of the potential consequences of it, especially during the transition we’re in right now where we can’t totally trust the cloud.
Here’s the part of Michael’s post that jumped out at me. “As regular folks store more data and rely more and more on the cloud, librarians would be well-served to spend some time pondering what this means for services and access. Be Sociable, Share!