Cloud computing is Internet- (“cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology (“computing”). In concept, it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them. It typically involves the provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet.

The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams and is an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it conceals. Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online which are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.These applications are broadly divided into the following categories: Software as a Service (SaaS), Utility Computing, Web Services, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Managed Service Providers (MSP), Service Commerce, and Internet Integration. The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that is often used to represent the Internet in flow charts and diagrams.
Characteristics
In general, cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure, instead avoiding capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Many cloud-computing offerings employ the utility computing model, which is analogous to how traditional utility services (such as electricity) are consumed, whereas others bill on a subscription basis. Sharing “perishable and intangible” computing power among multiple tenants can improve utilization rates, as servers are not unnecessarily left idle (which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development). A side-effect of this approach is that overall computer usage rises dramatically, as customers do not have to engineer for peak load limits. In addition, “increased high-speed bandwidth” makes it possible to receive the same response times from centralized infrastructure at other sites.
Economics
Diagram showing economics of cloud computing versus traditional IT, including capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx)Cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they use. Consumption is usually billed on a utility (e.g., resources consumed, like electricity) or subscription (e.g., time-based, like a newspaper) basis with little or no upfront cost. A few cloud providers are now beginning to offer the service for a flat monthly fee as opposed to on a utility billing basis. Other benefits of this time sharing-style approach are low barriers to entry, shared infrastructure and costs, low management overhead, and immediate access to a broad range of applications. In general, users can terminate the contract at any time (thereby avoiding return on investment risk and uncertainty), and the services are often covered by service level agreements (SLAs) with financial penalties.According to Nicholas Carr, the strategic importance of information technology is diminishing as it becomes standardized and less expensive. He argues that the cloud computing paradigm shift is similar to the displacement of electricity generators by electricity grids early in the 20th century.Although companies might be able to save on upfront capital expenditures, they might not save much and might actually pay more for operating expenses. In situations where the capital expense would be relatively small, or where the organization has more flexibility in their capital budget than their operating budget, the cloud model might not make great fiscal sense. Other factors impacting the scale of any potential cost savings include the efficiency of a company’s data center as compared to the cloud vendor’s, the company’s existing operating costs, the level of adoption of cloud computing, and the type of functionality being hosted in the cloud.

Architecture

The majority of cloud computing infrastructure, as of 2009, consists of reliable services delivered through data centers and built on servers with different levels of virtualization technologies. The services are accessible anywhere that provides access to networking infrastructure. Clouds often appear as single points of access for all consumers’ computing needs. Commercial offerings are generally expected to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements of customers and typically offer SLAs. Open standards are critical to the growth of cloud computing, and open source software has provided the foundation for many cloud computing implementations.
Cloud architecture, the systems architecture of the software systems involved in the delivery of cloud computing, comprises hardware and software designed by a cloud architect who typically works for a cloud integrator. It typically involves multiple cloud components communicating with each other over application programming interfaces, usually web services.This closely resembles the Unix philosophy of having multiple programs each doing one thing well and working together over universal interfaces. Complexity is controlled and the resulting systems are more manageable than their monolithic counterparts.Cloud architecture extends to the client, where web browsers and/or software applications access cloud applications.Cloud storage architecture is loosely coupled, where metadata operations are centralized enabling the data nodes to scale into the hundreds, each independently delivering data to applications or users.
Public cloudPublic cloud or external cloud describes cloud computing in the traditional mainstream sense, whereby resources are dynamically provisioned on a fine-grained, self-service basis over the Internet, via web applications/web services, from an off-site third-party provider who shares resources and bills on a fine-grained utility computing basis.

Hybrid cloudA hybrid cloud environment consisting of multiple internal and/or external providers “will be typical for most enterprises”. A hybrid cloud can describe configuration combining a local device, such as a Plug computer with cloud services. It can also describe configurations combining virtual and physical, colocated assets—for example, a mostly virtualized environment that requires physical servers, routers, or other hardware such as a network appliance acting as a firewall or spam filter.

Private cloudPrivate cloud and internal cloud are neologisms that some vendors have recently used to describe offerings that emulate cloud computing on private networks. These (typically virtualisation automation) products claim to “deliver some benefits of cloud computing without the pitfalls”, capitalising on data security, corporate governance, and reliability concerns. They have been criticized on the basis that users “still have to buy, build, and manage them” and as such do not benefit from lower up-front capital costs and less hands-on management, essentially “[lacking] the economic model that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept”.While an analyst predicted in 2008 that private cloud networks would be the future of corporate IT, there is some uncertainty whether they are a reality even within the same firm. Analysts also claim that within five years a “huge percentage” of small and medium enterprises will get most of their computing resources from external cloud computing providers as they “will not have economies of scale to make it worth staying in the IT business” or be able to afford private clouds. Analysts have reported on Platform’s view that private clouds are a stepping stone to external clouds, particularly for the financial services, and that future datacenters will look like internal clouds.The term has also been used in the logical rather than physical sense, for example in reference to platform as a service offerings, though such offerings including Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform are not available for on-premises deployment.

Key Characteristics
Agility improves with users able to rapidly and inexpensively re-provision technological infrastructure resources.
Cost is claimed to be greatly reduced and capital expenditure is converted to operational expenditure. This ostensibly lowers barriers to entry, as infrastructure is typically provided by a third-party and does not need to be purchased for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks.
Pricing on a utility computing basis is fine-grained with usage-based options and fewer IT skills are required for implementation (in-house).
Device and location independence enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or what device they are using (e.g., PC, mobile). As infrastructure is off-site (typically provided by a third-party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect from anywhere.
Multi-tenancy enables sharing of resources and costs across a large pool of users thus allowing for:
Centralization of infrastructure in locations with lower costs (such as real estate, electricity, etc.)
Peak-load capacity increases (users need not engineer for highest possible load-levels)
Utilization and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10–20% utilized.
Reliability improves through the use of multiple redundant sites, which makes cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery. Nonetheless, many major cloud computing services have suffered outages, and IT and business managers can at times do little when they are affected.
Scalability via dynamic (“on-demand”) provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis near real-time, without users having to engineer for peak loads. Performance is monitored, and consistent and loosely-coupled architectures are constructed using web services as the system interface.
Security typically improves due to centralization of data, increased security-focused resources, etc., but concerns can persist about loss of control over certain sensitive data, and the lack of security for stored kernels. Security is often as good as or better than under traditional systems, in part because providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford. Providers typically log accesses, but accessing the audit logs themselves can be difficult or impossible. Furthermore, the complexity of security is greatly increased when data is distributed over a wider area and / or number of devices.
Sustainability comes about through improved resource utilization, more efficient systems, and carbon neutrality. Nonetheless, computers and associated infrastructure are major consumers of energy.

Layers
Clients : A cloud client consists of computer hardware and/or computer software that relies on cloud computing for application delivery, or that is specifically designed for delivery of cloud services and that, in either case, is essentially useless without it. Mobile (Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile) Thin client (CherryPal, Wyse, Zonbu, gOS-based systems) Thick client / Web browser (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, WebKit)
Application : A cloud application leverages cloud computing in software architecture, often eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own computer, thus alleviating the burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support.  Peer-to-peer / volunteer computing (BOINC, Skype) Web applications (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) Security as a service (MessageLabs, Purewire, ScanSafe, Zscaler) Software as a service (A2Zapps.com, Google Apps, Salesforce) Software plus services (Microsoft Online Services) Storage [Distributed] Content distribution (BitTorrent, Amazon CloudFront) Synchronisation (Dropbox, Live Mesh, SpiderOak, ZumoDrive)
Platform : A cloud platform (PaaS) delivers a computing platform and/or solution stack as a service, generally consuming cloud infrastructure and supporting cloud applications. It facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers.
Services Identity (OAuth, OpenID) Payments (Amazon Flexible Payments Service, Google Checkout, PayPal) Search (Alexa, Google Custom Search, Yahoo! BOSS) Real-world (Amazon Mechanical Turk)
Solution stacks Java (Google App Engine) PHP (Rackspace Cloud Sites) Python Django (Google App Engine) Ruby on Rails (Heroku) .NET (Azure Services Platform, Rackspace Cloud Sites) Proprietary (Force.com, WorkXpress, Wolf Frameworks)
Storage [Structured] Databases (Amazon SimpleDB, BigTable) File storage (Amazon S3, Nirvanix, Rackspace Cloud Files) Queues (Amazon SQS)

Servers : The servers layer consists of computer hardware and/or computer software products that are specifically designed for the delivery of cloud services. Fabric computing (Cisco UCS)
Infrastructure : Cloud infrastructure (IaaS) is the delivery of computer infrastructure, typically a platform virtualization environment, as a service. Compute (Amazon CloudWatch, RightScale) Physical machines) Virtual machines (Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Rackspace Cloud Servers) OS-level virtualisation Network (Amazon VPC) Storage [Raw] (Amazon EBS)

Another technology that we are hearing more about is Google Wave.   What is it? How can it be used?

According to http://wave.google.com, Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Google Wave enables a group of users to share documents, join a “conversation”, get feedback, and record meeting minutes and discussions.  There are gadgets that are available to supplement a wave.

Our technology team provided this information and they will provide more specific information in another posting.  Consider this.  Is this the tool that can obsolete email?

This is a fabulous GIS system that is found on the Twin Cities Met Council site.    You can zoom in to any area and also layer it with various kinds of geographical data points that is particularly helpful if you’re trying to figure out development potential.

I will post this in links so that if you come back here looking for it, you’ll find it.   It will be in the links under Met Council GIS Mapping System.

There’s a lot of hype over Coca-Cola’s new social media campaign, Expedition 206. Phrases like, ‘most ambitious ever’ are being used in relation to this project and it’s true- this thing is huge.

Coca-Cola is sending three 20-somethings around to world, 206 countries, 365 days, and 1 mission: to find out what makes people happy. With facebook, twitter, flickr, and youtube at their sides these three Coke ambassadors will be connecting the world to their mission and (fingers crossed) attract some attention to their host product.

Natlie Zmuda provides more info.

I’ve been saying for a while that I don’t believe Microsoft has the right stuff to challenge Google, but that I would be all for another challenger in the world of search. But if you’ve been paying attention lately, Bing has been doing a lot to compete – and Google is matching them.

Obviously everyone knows about the Bing/Yahoo deal from a few months ago. Both sides were crowing about how they would start integrating Twitter into their search results – though frankly, I don’t know how good an idea that will be. Both may have just killed the site by opening the door to spammers – but we’ll have to just let the three of them work that out.

Then Microsoft announced this week they would start using the Wolfram Alpha Engine. This is a special little tool that finds answers to most any question that has a quantifiable answer. If you need to know what a specific sequence of numbers looks like as a barcode, this will show you. If you want to know the odds of a particular dice roll, they have that too. It’s just the kind of thing a search enginge claiming to be a “decission engine” should have.

Google has always had a wealth of features and purchased sites, (YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps,) so to respond they have to show improvements to what they already have. Movie listings have been expanded, and search listings boast greater child safety. Then of course there was Google Wave, and Google Voice, and just a few hours ago the Google Translator was unveiled. (Which will hopefully work better than the legendary but frequently awkward Babelfish.)

If you’re a capitalist, you know this will lead to many improvements in products from both sides. Google has been trying to transform Gmail into a more “social” platform for some time, and Bing has been getting better and better at image search…

If you worry about SEO, however, this means a LOT more work. (Good news for us professional SEOs!) For the first time in years I’ve been researching how to gain rankings on Bing, just in case – frankly, they still don’t have Google’s traffic, but that can change very quickly. Facebook kicked the snot out of MySpace in a matter of months. The people who were able to learn quickly and adapt got left behind quickly.

I’ve just spent a day and a half to update and fix my other “commerical” blog. Thanks God, it’s only a day and a half as it could have been easily more.  I haven’t updated that blog for ages. WordPress version has gone from 2.0 to 2.8. Many links were broken. The pages looked utterly hideous in different browers because the old theme didn’t work with the new wordpress version. Many affiliate links stopped working. My Amazon travel store doesn’t display goodies. Juck! Now the blog looks semi-decent and functional, I wonder if there is an easier and more efficient way of maintaing my blog.  Perhaps, I can come up with a check-list/procedure, similar to my other one for manage photos. It can be something like this:

• WP version: Check for newer WP version every 6 months or prompted by a message on the server to update, whichever happens last . On the other hand, if it’s working why fix. I don’t know the downside of this, but one thing I know for sure, the theme I’m using might not be compatible.  Theme => the look of the site is the first thing everybody recognizes so unless I fix the theme right away, I have to use an alternative one => losing all the customized work I’ve done.
• Upgrading method: Should I do it manuall or via my server? I don’t even know what’s the difference between these two: requirements and downside. 
• Backup blog: How often? Where to save the backup file? How to use this backup file anyway when the blog completely crashes? I backup my blog every once in a while and have these files either saved on the server or in the emails, but I have no idea on how to use them. 
• Export posts: How often? Where to save the file? This is essential if you don’t want to lose all of your work.
• Theme changes:  I would like change the look every few months, but first I need to understand the very basic of a WP  theme template how certain things affect it. Also I need to nail down the part of theme package that will have to change to accommodate my own customization. 
• Web design (HTML, CSS, PHP):  Good oh lord I have forgotten every thing.  Some tags were deprecated since the last decade and I just learned it yesterday.  I knew a tidbid of PHP to cut/copy/paste/moving other people’s code around without fatally ruin it, still having a deeper understand of it would have made my life simpler. Moreover, if I care a little bit more for CSS, I could have gotten the page look I want. 
• Publishing content:  At least this is the only department I’m most decent. I do update more regularly now in a very organized and efficient way. Thanks to Firefox’s Scribefire addon.  I keep posts online so I can access them from everywhere. Once finished, I use Scribefire and schedule publish to my blog. 
• What else?

I have been on a long-term technology/gadget fasting and try to minimize getting involved too much in the technical side of everything, so to do these kinds of things is problematic for me.

I was a senior in high school when 9/11 happened. As a 17 year-old, I found myself glued to the television set, hoping and praying that the NYPD and NYFD would continue to find more survivors. Other than the Florida Recounts, that was probably the first real time that I started to care about the news. At that time, I hadn’t heard of the Fox News Channel or if I had, I hadn’t heard much. I would watch NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, or CNN Headline News if I had access to cable. It was sometimes during the summer of 2002 when I began watching Fox News. I’m not sure why, but they just seemed a little more direct rather than being evasive. As an 18 year-old, I had come from a public school system where almost everything I had heard or been taught had a leftist slant to it. I think the first real show I ever watched in its entirety on FNC was the O’Reilly Factor hosted by registered Independent, Bill O’Reilly. He was commenting about how the days of tolerating deception in the middle of an interview was over, and that it was legitimate to interrupt someone who was spreading lies or deliberately slanting an issue.

At that time, I didn’t know what slant FNC had, but it seemed more even-handed to me than CNN was. I also began watching Hannity & Colmes, hosted by Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes. During the Florida Recounts, I remember watching CNN’s The Spin Room and I thought that was the pinnacle of debate shows, but H&C was way better. They gave both sides a chance to speak and a person could get a perspective from both sides of the issue. I took a hiatus from watching FNC in order to watch the 2002 World Series, and to cheer the Angels to victory. I voted for Bill Simon in the California Gubernatorial Election, but Gray Davis won re-election.

After those events, I resumed watching Hannity & Colmes and The O’Reilly Factor for some analysis of the day’s current events. In December 2002 and January of 2003, I wasn’t able to watch FNC for a while because I was in a transitory residential situation. Late in January of 2003, I resumed watching FNC because I moved into a room-for-rent that gave me free satellite TV. I began watching Fox & Friends, Studio B, the Fox Report, and I resumed watching Hannity & Colmes and The O’Reilly Factor. Whenever I wasn’t at community college doing an assignment, I was watching FNC, especially when the U.S. went to war to liberate Iraq.

I’ve been a fairly consistent viewer ever since. I became what some might call a “news junkie,” not only did I watch most of the shows on Fox but I watched most of the reruns as well. Even in these past couple of years where my cable services have been non-existent, I still go to www.foxnews.com and click on their videos section to watch segments from various shows.

So that’s it folks; no mysteries, no drama, no secret meetings in Limbaugh’s livingroom. Just an 18-25 year old who had been taught by her mother to filter out the crap while going through public school in California.