There’s been a lot of concern about Facebook recently. Beyond changes in aesthetic design – which alone can cause mass protest from its users – Facebook has also implemented significant feature changes that, to many, cause significant privacy concerns. I will only say that I am also concerned – not to the point of deleting my account (yet), but enough to make me think more carefully about my exposure on that service.
“The cloud” is a big buzz word nowadays. Like their physical brethren, digital clouds can take a variety of shapes. The form getting the most attention is the Google and Facebook-type clouds. You upload your information to computers controlled by Google, and Google provides the browser interface to interact with that information. You create a Facebook profile, write on the walls of your friends, make comments on photos — all of this information is stored on Facebook’s computers, and they provide you with a web-based interface to manipulate it.
But really, the Internet itself is a cloud. Whenever you visit any website, you are downloading a copy of a file that is hosted on someone else’s computer. It may be a computer owned by a corporation, it may be a computer rented by someone in a datacenter, or it may be a computer sitting under a college kid’s desk. For this website, I pay about $80 a year to buy space from a computer host based somewhere in Utah. I uploaded the WordPress blogging software to that space, and I access it remotely to create new posts and edit the blog design. No company owns my space, or my content. I do.
After much deliberation over many months and miles, I have finally made a decision: I will be a proud member of the Class of 2013 (!) at 
