Just a Brief Post Today

I've been blogging now for almost three weeks. I've come to enjoy the opportunity to write every day even if my choice of topics have been trivial ones. More and more often the Easton Curiosity Shop takes more than it's allotted hour with research and rewriting and that too is an enjoyable feature. Every writer writes for an audience even a diarist writes to hear themselves, but a blogger is much more a part of a community than a typical writer due to the instant feedback of a blog. My community is a very, very small one mostly of people I see on a weekly or monthly basis with the blog serving as the conversations we never seem to have time to have.

Blogging has been a great experience and who knows where it will grow from here, but I note that Chet Raymo has been blogging daily since the middle of 2004! Chet's blogs, accessible by clicking to the right of this post, are humane, profound, and often witty. I was particularly impressed by one from the other day.

Changing the Subject

Have you heard about the cloud? That's where its happening these days. The cloud is the term for computer programs and data storage that don't live on your hard drive, but are accessible through your web browser. For example, this week Amazon decided to give away 5 gigabytes of storage on their servers accessible from Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. They are doing this to promote downloading their music mp3s but note the space can be used to store and recall any kind of files.  I have about 50 gigabytes of music on my iPod and can imagine the day when someone will give me space to back it all up in the cloud. That means all my music will become available from any computer with access to the Internet anywhere in the world. What happens to radio then? What happens to musical copyright?

Even more interesting is prezi. This is a cloud based presentation program that aims to replace PowerPoint and Keynote. The program is based on zooming and rotating instead of the old slide show paradigm so it takes some getting used to-tutorials feature instructions on how to avoid giving your audience vertigo-but once you get used to using it results can be spectacular. If you go to the site click on the tab labelled "Explore" to see examples.