Recently, some journalism students from the American University in DC asked if they could interview me about cloud computing. As I wrote back to them, I realized that the discussion was different from what I usually talk about when it comes for clouds. These are journalism students, and they likely have a different view of “cloud computing” from the technobabble we technologists enjoy. It’s also about how schools will use on-demand applications. So I figured I’d re-post the thread here.

One of the biggest things I realized was that “clouds” can mean “elastic, on-demand compute platforms” or just “stuff that runs on the web” depending on who you’re talking to. And while these seem like two separate definitions, ultimately, they’re the same thing.

The Q&A, below the fold.

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Interop’s in full swing in New York this week. Yesterday’s Enterprise Cloud Summit sold out, and the panelists and audience made it a joy to moderate — lots of good questions.

Let us know if you have questions or want to use the content somewhere.

Clouds are transforming IT; that’s not news. But regardless of your cloud computing agenda, clouds are already affecting your IT plans, because they give you a cudgel with which to bludgeon traditional software and infrastructure providers.

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I got to Velocity this morning, and Jesse asked me if I wanted to get on stage for five minutes to talk before lunch. Given that I’m doing a session in the afternoon called What The Rest Of Your Company Knows About Your Website, I figured I should make something new.

One of the things that’s abundantly clear — echoed in presentations from Shopzilla, Google, and many other excellent speakers — is that performance matters. It affects your conversion rates; it even changes your Search Engine Marketing ranking (which was news to me.)

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Just finished a one-hour dash through web monitoring from a community manager’s point of view. The slides are available as a PDF; while this deck deals somewhat with the business of monitoring communities, it also looks at how to tie those communities back to business outcomes in analytics and how to take a more holistic approach.

Plus, it has my new favorite image of a community gardener in it. It’ll get me yelled at.  Here’s the deck.

We’ll have more stuff like this over at www.watchingwebsites.com.

We presented at Enterprise 2.0 today in Boston. It was an interesting day, with a three-hour session on the fundamentals of clouds and where they’ll be going, followed by three panels:

• End users from Linden Labs, Brainpark, Vertica, and Gilt
• Cloud operators from Joyent, Xcalibre, Intuit, and Terremark
• Next-gen platform and tool builders from Smart (Joyent), rPath, and Sonoa (unfortunately, Woody from Eucalyptus wasn’t able to join us)

The morning session was around 200 slides, with lots of new images and diagrams. We’ve posted it here (it’s around 80 MBytes.) As always, if you’re going to use some of this content, please provide attribution and a link back to Bitcurrent.

You’ve seen bad metaphors for the Internet. Pop culture is filled with films where special effects show computer networks as highways, with towering servers encroaching on light-filled roads. These scenes try to represent the Internet as, well, a series of tubes (Play this clip from Hackers to jog your memory.)*

This happens a lot in Hollywood, and in too many cyberpunk novels (like one I’m finishing now just to spite myself.) I forgive William Gibson’s “collective hallucination” and Neil Stephenson’s Metaverse because, well, they’re good books.

But maybe the UI of the future will look like this after all, at least for certain applications. Check out Britain from Above by way of the folks at Flowing Data. Warning: clicking this video may make your browser lock up for a minute for some reason. Be patient, or go to the Youtube playlist.

There are clips for telecommunications, air traffic, and even shipping on the site itself, which is well worth the visit.

I’m a huge believer in visualizing information and making the world more understandable, and the convergence of things like geomapping and GPS are making understanding even easier. These clips resemble nothing if not an RTS for the real world. It makes me want to click and drag routes for cars and boats.

I used to think Tron was a great movie, but not really a UI. Now I’m starting to wonder how these flying-through-data approaches, first conceived as a network metaphor for the non nerd, can become user interfaces.

This is how the prescient visuals of Minority Report slowly become reality.

We’re about to drink from a firehose of positional data as location-aware personal devices replace traditional cellphones and we move towards a sensor-driven world. We have the cloud computing infrastructure to handle massive computing and fast data retrieval. How long until Britain From Above becomes a live Google Earth overlay?

Oh, wait. It already is. Here’s the site’s Google Earth layer. When will web analytics catch up with this?

(*For real fun, check out the eighties-era Mac copy dialog at 8:18 in that Hackers clip. Anachronisms, FTW!)

Mark Dowds and I just finished the Beyond Technology event in Vancouver, BC. Lots of folks wanted the slides, so here they are.

My content focused on the outside community — how to find and join conversations that your market, customers, and partners are having. Mark’s presentation looked at the cultural changes within organizations, and how social networking can help capture learning and promote sharing of knowledge within companies.

It was a very interesting discussion, with lots of follow-up both online and off.

Today, I’m going to write about an equation. I’ll try to make it easy to follow, but it’s still stats and graphs. Stay tuned and I’m convinced it will be worth your while, because in my opinion, it’s the most important equation in cloud computing. It’s what drives your market, your customers, and your burn rate.

If you build a traditional data center platform for your application, you worry about three variables: The amount of traffic to your site, your capacity to handle that traffic, and the user experience they get, such as latency. The equation looks like this:

User experience = Traffic / Capacity

As traffic increases, user experience gets worse and delay goes up. This is because each visit to your site consumes resources on your infrastructure, and some users wind up waiting for the app to respond. Networks get full; databases encounter record locking; message queues back up; and so on. Ultimately, some of your visitors have a lousy experience.

On-demand computing platforms fundamentally change how you deal with this, because as far as you’re concerned, they have infinite capacity.

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A few posts back, Alistair wrote about Human 2.0, focusing on sensory immersion, augmented reality. and bridging the gap between the human and the screen. These techniques are only half of the Human 2.0 equation -  they modify the environment – the inputs – not the human body itself.

Human 2.0 is about breaking human performance barriers, both mental and physical, by modifying the human body and environment. Think transhumanism. Biogerontology. Life extension. Brain hacking. Body hacking. Even baby hacking.

I’ve been interested in these fields for more than a decade, to the point that I have my own EEG at home so I can read my brain waves and learn to modify them at will. Some people have closets full of golf clubs they never use. Mine is full of soliton lasers, cerebro-electric stimulators, light/sound goggles, micro pulse generators, and FIR-LED neuron growth stimulators. I can’t wait to get my own Emotiv headset.

Smart drugs? Tried them all (and I won’t say if I take them now). I’m a board member of a non-profit called the Smart Life Forum that meets once a month in Palo Alto. (Third Thursday of the month – check it out; I’ll be there…) SmartLife’s advisors include leading anti-aging physicians and Steve Fowkes, author of “Smart Drugs II,” and head of the Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute. Hormone testing? Been there. SPECT scan? Done that. Ayahuasca? Check. You get the point. Ray Kurzweil definitely gets the point.

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