It’s been almost 10 months since I’ve started this blog. I still haven’t advertised my site (davetang.org) or my blog (davetang.org/wordpress) to friends and family, although if you Google “Dave Tang”, davetang.org is the second hit! (yes I Google myself). I guess I can’t compete with davetanghorses.com, with their 40 years of experience with horses (just to clarify, they are first hit, if you Google Dave Tang).

But the purpose of having my own site was just for the satisfaction of owning a domain, especially one with my name in it! And the purpose of my blog, was just to have an outlet for the many things that cross my mind. Although I am a bit more attentive to what I write these days due to a very bad experience. I dread what happened, but it was a good experience in professionalism.

But you know, sometimes I still want to delete this blog. Keeping this blog, opens me up to the world. I may be attacked, criticised and be judged for what I write. My pages are open to anyone with an internet connection (who at this stage, has to bother with Googling me). And there’s always the problem of me wanting my blog to be a perfectly articulated piece of art, which it isn’t and which it why I want to delete it.

But I mean, this is me. This is who I am; these are my interests and these are the things I care about. I am not perfect and there will be times when I have difficulty with issues, just like anybody else. So I think I’ve come to accept the fact that this is really me. And I’m not writing a novel either.

So for the uninitiated, here’s my very simple example explaining some concepts of cloud computing. Few years ago I was trying to import my bookmarks from one web browser to another. After some fiddling around I found the folder that held my bookmarks and to my surprise and delight, it was a HTML file. That then gave me the idea of getting some free web space and simply hosting this HTML file online. Since I only knew of one company that had free web hosting, geocities, I signed up for a geocities account and uploaded this HTML file which I creatively called bookmarks.html. Now instead of having to import my bookmarks from one computer to another, or not having access to my bookmarks if I wasn’t using my own computer, I can access my bookmarks from any computer that has Internet access. I can now also add new bookmarks from any computer (that has Internet access) I want if I found an interesting site while surfing on another computer.

What does this have to do with cloud computing? Basically the cloud is a metaphor for the Internet. Cloud computing basically means having computing services provided on the Internet. Using my example you can see the benefits of the cloud (in my case the cloud computing service was provided for free), i.e. I had access to a list of my favourite sites from any computer with an internet connection, I have one centralised bookmarks file and I can now share my favourite sites with everyone with an internet connection. Since more and more people are getting connected to the Internet and we are getting faster Internet connections, this really seems like the future of computing. Businesses will no longer need to buy computing equipment, hire administrators or even web designers; they just need to pay for cloud computing services. Individuals will also prefer the cloud, as it can mean many things such as they don’t have to worry about backing up their data or can have access to their files from anywhere.

Google at the moment is really positioning itself as THE service provider for cloud computing. They provide services (mostly free) for you to store your conversations, your documents, your internet history, your journal, your photos and countless other things. I don’t like the idea of having everything owned by one company which is pretty much the only disadvantage I see in cloud computing, since it will only make Google stronger. But oh well, we’ve been living under Microsoft for so many years now, time for a change I guess.