I’ve been accused (rightly so, I might add) of enjoying general vanilla, Everyman news purveyors such as USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, along with Wired, BusinessWeek and Fortune. (I also read much more, much to my wife’s chagrin as noted by the stacks of materials and periodicals around my home office and other areas, and the weight of our weekly recycling bin.) Although I receive print versions of each, I’m reading the online versions more and more: 2008 is the year that I believe I passed the half-way point for most of my news consumed via bits and bytes rather than by bits of paper.
I resolve in 2009 to cut at least two and migrate completely to digital. (Note: one decision was already made for me, as PC Magazine announced the move to go all digital in 2008 and quite thoughtfully automatically converted the duration of my subscription. I wish others would offer similar opportunities to their subscribers, rather than only offering much higher priced versions than their paper doppelgangers.)
In addition, I have a number of my web news favourites including CNET News, which offers their own coverage as well as syndicated and links to other top stories across the news web. This week, CNET offers their take on the news highlights from 2008, including these year in review stories on the cloud compiled by Dawn Kawamoto, Staff Writer at CNET News…
"Look beyond the tumultuous economic storm and you’ll see something else forming–cloud computing, a term and concept that took off in 2008.
"If you look at Google Trends, ‘cloud computing’ came out of nowhere in 2008. People were searching for it in the third quarter of 2007, but it went bonkers in 2008," said Frank Gillett, vice president and principal analyst with Forrester Research.
"Indeed. Not only did the number of Google searches for the term "cloud computing" skyrocket in 2008, so did the number of related news stories."
Amazon storage ‘cloud’ service goes dark — Some Web 2.0 start-ups get cranky after Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service goes offline for a few hours. February 15, 2008
Study: Cloud to brighten future of data centers — New hosting companies that target start-ups could bring cloud computing into businesses as a data center replacement, research firm Forrester says. March 10, 2008
More on Microsoft’s database-in-the-cloud service — Microsoft’s new SQL Server Data Services, a database-in-the-cloud service coming soon, might have been the sleeper announcement of this year’s Mix conference. March 10, 2008
Yahoo looking to unleash its cloud infrastructure — CTO Ari Balogh says that much like Amazon’s EC2 and Google’s App Engine, Yahoo could offer infrastructure services. June 26, 2008
Can you trust your business to Google’s cloud? Cloud computing is ever more fashionable. This week’s Google Apps outage shows that online applications and services aren’t perfect, but that the concept is growing up. July 11, 2008
HP, Intel, Yahoo join forces on cloud research — New "test bed" project will give companies, as well as partnering researchers, access to top-notch hardware for exploring the future of the hot server-outsourcing technology. July 29, 2008
10 Worst Web glitches of 2008 (so far) — It’s a countdown of crashes, a timeline of terror. See what happens when the cloud rains on the likes of Amazon, Twitter, and Apple. August 15, 2008
Oracle’s Ellison nails cloud computing — Speaking at OracleWorld, CEO Larry Ellison says that the computer industry as fad-driven as fashion and that cloud computing is simply the latest fad. September 26, 2008
Report: Ballmer hints at Windows Cloud — In a speech in London, the Microsoft chief executive reportedly talks about a coming cloud-based OS, as well as plans to allow light Office document editing over the Web. October 1, 2008
IBM puts Bluehouse tinge on cloud computing — Company will challenge Internet-centric "cloud" pioneers by promoting a mix of cloud-based and on-premises services. October 6, 2008
Windows Azure: Blue skies ahead? Analysts praise Microsoft’s ambition with its Azure cloud-computing effort but say that getting there will take some time. October 27, 2008
Google promises reliability for Docs, Calendar — Overall, Gmail has been available 99.9 percent of the time. Now, Premier customers get a promise of that level of reliability for all of Google Apps. October 30, 2008
Tags: articles, what I read, news, CNET, blogs, cloud.
