There is plenty of buzz about the cloud. Apple's latest to hit the market is the iCloud. This allows users to access 5gb of media from any of their Apple devices. A step in the right direction, surely, but is it the cloud - or is just access to a chunk of data over the web? iCloud would be a little cloudier if it, say, enabled users to share their data with other users in the cloud. This way people would be members of a communal data library, fully accessible to all connected devices... Wouldn’t that be so scary to ‘intellectual property’ owners.
If the cloud is the paradigm superceding the web then it needs to be greater than simply a high-speed + big-storage Internet.
A 'metaweb' is what comes to mind. If the standard unit of the web is the website, then a cloudsite would be one which allows comprehensive access to the entirety of the Internet. Just as the WWW enabled the interlinking of data/services, the cloud could enable the integration of data/services.
As the web has evolved over the last couple decades, the world’s intranets have plugged in. Hidden behind the ‘website layer’ are the world’s databases, on the network, yet difficult to access. These databases contain a wealth of structured data on the entire sphere of knowledge/activity on (and off) the planet.
The New Internet, Web 3.0, The Cloud - whatever you’d like to call it - will be an open and integrated data/service superset. It will make the global nature of the Internet seem as if its locally stored on your little device.
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