The Water Cooler

With the world’s information at our fingertips begging for us to search for it, what could make this super-technological information age better?  How about information that finds you.  That’s what technologies created by Google and yahoo now do.  It’s now possible to use a web application that aggregates search results, filters and sorts RSS feeds, and allows the results to be displayed on your home page or any page you can edit.  Somehow this seems too good to be true.  No work research right?  Well not exactly, while these tools will save you time in the long run, perpare to spend some time up front setting all of this up.

To do this, here is a summary of what you have to do:

• 1. Subscribe to a web aggregator like Netvibes or iGoogle. You can use this tool to subscribe to regular RSS feeds and add fun applications such as Weather, email, twitter and even facebook.
• 2. Search Yahoo Pipes to see if someone has already made a pipe that gathers the information you are looking for. Keep in mind you can clone and tweak it if it’s not exactly what you are looking for.
• 3. If you can’t find a pipe, run a search for all of the blogs or news feeds on a particular topic. You might hit a gold mine and find that someone has created a list of all the blogs or news pages about a topic. Copy all the URLs onto a text page or spread sheet.
• 4. Create a Yahoo pipe that combines all the feeds into one. Paste the urls into a Fetch site feed module or a Fetch feed module. Be sure to add a filter that looks for the key terms you want and a sort module to put the newest posts first. You can also add a Yahoo or Google search feed into the mix. There may even be library databases that generate search feeds to add more scholarly articles to the mix.
• 5. Save and run your feed, then click on the “get as a badge” button, and click on the aggregator you use, if yours is not listed, click on the embed code. Copy the code and drop it into your favorite webpage or aggregator in an html box to create a badge that will always give you the latest information on the topic of your choice.
• 6. You’re done, obviously I have left out several complicated steps using Pipes, read the pipe documentation for tips on creating efficient pipes.

Now the filtered information comes to you.  No more sorting through hundreds of web pages looking for current news.  No more going to several sites each day to get your information.  Your information is delivered to your doorstep in the form of a fully customizable newspaper.  The best part is that no trees were sacrificed and no money was spent!

No I don’t mean booting your laptop when you’re en route to JFK or O’hare, I mean computing using web 2.0+ programs that have become more prevalent in our daily lives.  Combine this with the recent popular movement to compact portable underpowered devices used specifically for accessing the web.  Specifically, iPhones, Blackberry’s netbooks, compact tablets ect.   There is a real push to put data back onto the sever.  In a cloud computing world, very little content will be ran on the client pc.  Let’s face it, data on the client is dangerous.  Hard drives fail, computers get a virus or can be lost or stolen and files are often only accessible from that machine.  Also, files on client machines are hard to share with a team of authors.  These are all problems that cloud computing solves.  Files that are on the web can be shared with others and are backed up regularly.  They are not specific to one client machine and therefore the file is much safer from being lost by a client computer problem.  Google docs, Zoho, and others are already offering successful cloud computing productivity solutions that allows you to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more that all are saved on the web and sharable for collaborative authoring.  The quality of these solutions is now beginning to rival professional client side options such as Microsoft Office or Open Office.  The drive toward cloud computing has caught Microsoft’s attention as they are now looking into integrating a cloud computing solution into future Microsoft Office projects.   

Also, with mobile computing options ever growing, people can use a device to access the cloud on the go instead of at their desktop.  With the cloud, one could take their office with them anywhere they want to.  The blackberry addiction that occurred recently before the iPhone took off, is an indicator of how people can become chained to the work even when away from their desks.  Now we can be productive while waiting in line to buy tickets to a movie, while we wait to get a table at our favorite restaurant, or even while we wait for our car’s oil to be changed.   Now, applications that connect to the cloud can allow us to do things with these mobile devices that even a desktop can’t do.  Examples include GPS specific searches, finding the artist and name of the song playing on the radio, and many more that are being developed all the time.

The risks:

Like every solution, new problems can often arise in place of those that were solved.  In a cloud computing world, data must be safeguarded.  The main way this is managed currently is through passwords and security questions.  Like most of you, I have nearly a dozen passwords that I often forget, and I feel uncomfortable choosing a canned security question that anyone who stalks me could figure out.  Therefore, for cloud computing to be the norm, we must find a better way.  We’ve all heard the risks of moving toward biometrics, but this could be part of the solution.  Perhaps if we had one central authentication system that was secure and could plug into different web applications, we could pull off a complete cloud computing system.  However, such a system will always be a security risk. 

Finally, with data in the cloud, can we ever be complete sure it is ours?  If it is on a server somewhere, can someone else access it and take our ideas?  These sorts of conspiracy theories definitely have some merit.  Do you feel comfortable having your personal diary in a place where everyone can see it?  Some might, but a good handful of people would prefer to keep it on their client computer even if it was password protected somewhere in the clouds.

The movement toward cloud computing has already begun.  This is why Microsoft is bleeding programmers and Google is growing.  However, until we mitigate the risks, cloud computing will remain, well where it currently is, out there in there in the clouds.