Is your head stuck in a cloud?

I briefly mentioned the word "cloud" in a post I did earlier today.  I wanted to talk a little more about how this word is changing for us today and what cloud means in the digital age.  This will be a big help for people like my dad who asked me the other day to explain the cloud to him. As I talk about this, I have to confess that my mind always makes an ironic reference to Aristophones' The Clouds whenever I think of the modern-day use of cloud 

A cloud, when talking in digital or technical jargon can be more than one thing.  The first example is a word cloud, like the image above.  Word clouds, like this one made with wordle, show an analysis of words used in any given context and assigns the word a size according to the number of times repeated, relatively, in the piece it analyzes.  This wordle I have here is an analysis of my blog.  By looking at it I instantly see that I favor the word "class" in this blog.  This can have several uses.  Look at the bar on the right and you will see that I use a word cloud to show my diigo tags and also, lower down, the tags for my posts on this blog.  The more often a tag is used, the bigger it appears in the cloud.  Easy enough, and quite fun to play with.  This can be useful in education to help students analyze a work and see how often important words are used.  They can easily find themes and topics addressed in any written work.  Wordle isn't the only resource available to make word clouds.  For more sites that help you do this, check our the post Sites for Creating Word Clouds.


Clouds, like those mentioned in my earlier text, can also be a way of referring to what is, essentially, online storage.  Maybe you have heard the term online computing?  The idea is that you can store your data online, free or sometimes for a fee, and will be able to access it anywhere.  The term is because the information is imagined as a cloud floating around you which you can reach into and grab out whatever you wish to access without carrying it with you.  Googledocs is a good example of using the cloud, which Microsoft has tried to emulate with their new Office 2010.  Also, sites like Amazon or Netflix offer access to content without the necessity of storing it on your computer.  If you buy music on Amazon and store it "in the cloud" it isn't creating a new copy of the songs you buy and storing it somewhere.  It is basically granting you access to the master copy that they own which you can use at your leisure.

Photo by sharmili r

Clouds are good because they reduce our need to carry storage devices or have storage space allocated in our homes for movies, music, books and documents.  It can be a great advantage as long as you have a connection to the internet and there are no problems with the server running the cloud.  So, maybe having your head in the cloud is not such a bad thing these days.

Tell me. Do you cloud compute?  Do you think that one day the cloud will replace hard drives and DVD players?  Can we trust clouds?