Futuríveis

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But where is “there,” and what does it look like?

“There” is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers. These centers run enormously scaled software applications with millions of users. To appreciate the scope of this phenomenon, and its crushing demands on storage capacity, let me sketch just the iceberg’s tip of one average individual digital presence: my own. I have photos on Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo, so they reside in a Yahoo data center, probably the one in Wenatchee, Wash.); the Wikipedia entry about me dwells on a database in Tampa, Fla.; the video on YouTube of a talk I delivered at Google’s headquarters might dwell in any one of Google’s data centers, from The Dalles in Oregon to Lenoir, N.C.; my LinkedIn profile most likely sits in an Equinix-run data center in Elk Grove Village, Ill.; and my blog lives at Modwest’s headquarters in Missoula, Mont. If one of these sites happened to be down, I might have Twittered a complaint, my tweet paying a virtual visit to (most likely) NTT America’s data center in Sterling, Va. And in each of these cases, there would be at least one mirror data center somewhere else — the built-environment equivalent of an external hard drive, backing things up.

Small wonder that this vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric — and vaporous — metaphor: the cloud. Trying to chart the cloud’s geography can be daunting, a task that is further complicated by security concerns. “It’s like ‘Fight Club,’ ” says Rich Miller, whose Web site, Data Center Knowledge, tracks the industry. “The first rule of data centers is: Don’t talk about data centers.”
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NYT

<cite>Why The New York Times Doesn't Call Its Readers 'Readers' - Advertising Age - Digital</cite>: "

Speaking at the CaT: Creativity and Technology conference today, Derek Gottfrid, senior software architect and product technologist at The New York Times, said the company has quit calling online readers 'readers,' instead referring to them as users. The conference is hosted by Advertising Age and Creativity.'When we think traditionally about creation [at The New York Times] it was limited to people within the Times,' he said. 'We created for readers ... [for whom] it was a passive experience. But as we moved online, we wanted to move people from readers to users.'To do so, the company has opened up its application programming interfaces, which Mr. Gottfrid described for the layperson as 'programmer building blocks.' The Times has taken content and data -- both internally created material, such as movie reviews and best-seller lists, and external data, such as campaign-finance and legislative information -- and opened up the APIs so that outside developers can create tools for its consumers.

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<cite>How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live -- Printout -- TIME</cite>: "

This is not just a matter of people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of grouping a topic or event by the 'hashtag' �"