Chasing the Cloud?
My name is Ramon and I'm a webdeveloper and internet strategist at eFocus in Utrecht, The Netherlands. You've made it to this site, which is good. It's a blog about the internet. You've heard of it? Great! Then let's talk about internet- technology, marketing, trends, strategy and everything else that has to do with it. My name is Ramon, what's yours?
Search
My network
Blogroll
My other sites
The beginning
Thursday 15 january 2009
My name is Ramon and besides being a web developer and internet strategist at eFocus in Utrecht, the Netherlands, I dip my fingers in many other creative pools, but that’s not for now,... this site is purely for my writings about the internet. So let’s start.
The Internet, the internet without a capital letter, cyberspace, the web, the interwebs and much more. The digital highway has been known under many different names and now the world wide web is often referred to as The Cloud. I had to pick just one as the name of this site, so I chose the last one. But why are there so many different names for something that’s arguably the same thing? Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? It’s not the same thing. In the beginning (insert dramatic music here), the internet was a connection between computers, hence the “inter” part. Then William Gibson came along and coined the term “Cyberspace”, a place where one could actually stay, albeit virtually. The world wide web, or web for short, was the layer on top of the internet which facilitated pages or sites as we like to call it now (does anyone say “lookup my homepage” anymore?). The interwebs was a mash-up purely for fun, it was the reaction to the many different names the “thing” got and the confusion it brought to the non-digital among us. If you really want to get a laugh, try mentioning at a party you just installed Internet 2.0. But continuing the naming conventions, I could go on for ages!
But nowadays the Cloud is a popular choice, why? As one day the physical workspace shifted more and more towards the computer, now the computer is shifting more and more towards the internet. Software doesn’t need to be installed anymore, it’s just a site like all others, except the functionality goes beyond what we ever expected! Try Google Docs for instance, it’s a word processor site if you will that can do most of the things a normal word processor can do, no hassle of installing and available from any internet connected computer in the world! This second transportation of our workspace is often connected with the term Cloud, a “space” where data is stored. If you use Google Docs, your texts are in the Cloud. Do you use Flickr for your photos? Than those photos are in the Cloud. Delicious? Bookmarks in the Cloud. MobileMe’s iDisk? Files in the Cloud. And the list goes on. This way you can also use other devices to connect to the Cloud to get the data. As an Apple fanboy my MacBook is synced with my iMac, my iPhone and my iPhone, all from the Cloud. Change one thing in my agenda? All the devices know about it. This is not an Apple exclusive by the way, it’s just an example. You can sync your Blackberry with your laptop and workcomputer with Vista just as easily as well.
But what’s in a name? In the case of The Cloud, not much. They could’ve also used the term Bucket, but it just doesn’t have that ring to it. And seriously, who would visit a site named Chasing the Bucket?
So this was the first post. Stay tuned for more posts.
The Internet, the internet without a capital letter, cyberspace, the web, the interwebs and much more. The digital highway has been known under many different names and now the world wide web is often referred to as The Cloud. I had to pick just one as the name of this site, so I chose the last one. But why are there so many different names for something that’s arguably the same thing? Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? It’s not the same thing. In the beginning (insert dramatic music here), the internet was a connection between computers, hence the “inter” part. Then William Gibson came along and coined the term “Cyberspace”, a place where one could actually stay, albeit virtually. The world wide web, or web for short, was the layer on top of the internet which facilitated pages or sites as we like to call it now (does anyone say “lookup my homepage” anymore?). The interwebs was a mash-up purely for fun, it was the reaction to the many different names the “thing” got and the confusion it brought to the non-digital among us. If you really want to get a laugh, try mentioning at a party you just installed Internet 2.0. But continuing the naming conventions, I could go on for ages!
But nowadays the Cloud is a popular choice, why? As one day the physical workspace shifted more and more towards the computer, now the computer is shifting more and more towards the internet. Software doesn’t need to be installed anymore, it’s just a site like all others, except the functionality goes beyond what we ever expected! Try Google Docs for instance, it’s a word processor site if you will that can do most of the things a normal word processor can do, no hassle of installing and available from any internet connected computer in the world! This second transportation of our workspace is often connected with the term Cloud, a “space” where data is stored. If you use Google Docs, your texts are in the Cloud. Do you use Flickr for your photos? Than those photos are in the Cloud. Delicious? Bookmarks in the Cloud. MobileMe’s iDisk? Files in the Cloud. And the list goes on. This way you can also use other devices to connect to the Cloud to get the data. As an Apple fanboy my MacBook is synced with my iMac, my iPhone and my iPhone, all from the Cloud. Change one thing in my agenda? All the devices know about it. This is not an Apple exclusive by the way, it’s just an example. You can sync your Blackberry with your laptop and workcomputer with Vista just as easily as well.
But what’s in a name? In the case of The Cloud, not much. They could’ve also used the term Bucket, but it just doesn’t have that ring to it. And seriously, who would visit a site named Chasing the Bucket?
So this was the first post. Stay tuned for more posts.