I first heard of "the cloud" at a library conference a couple of years ago. I was simultaneously intrigued and turned off by the presenter who envisioned everyone living in the cloud and everything anyone had ever created being available with a couple of keystrokes, or voice commands. The intriguing part was the idea of a personal computer crash not being a personal disaster. The turn off was the magic show quality that I left with, I was not exactly sure how things, which were impressive, were done, and what exactly the assistants were up to behind their screen of smoke and mirrors.
Now, after playing around some with google.docs I can see first-hand the advantages of being able to update and access documents from many places and the relative ease of learning how to use google.docs. However, for the cloud to work, a thousand different pieces must work perfectly and it is a rare day that I do not experience a technology glitch (or worse). Recently our library acquired a new platform for downloading eBooks and eAudiobooks (great!), and there was a free app for my phone so I did not have to an iTune user (great!), but the app required an update and the update would not finish loading, so I do not download to my phone...which sounded so great (!) in the beginning.
I am sure the cloud is here to stay, but I wonder who really knows what goes on behind the scenes, how expert must one be to work around the glitches and the things that don't quite mesh, and exactly how many self-educated hackers it would take to bring the cloud crashing down on our Chicken Little heads.
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