One month ago, I published online the draft outline of a series of book and writing concepts.
One of the concepts had a geek sci-fi ring about it, “memories of the cloud”.
It described a future when everybody is connected- 24/7.
Yawn- you would say: it sounds like a ton of sci-fi stories.
And when everybody has an implant linking directly to this shared conscience.
Big yawn- Johnny Mnemonic, Matrix, Aeon Flux, and so on… not so original.
Plus- everybody talks about the “cloud”, this distant technology where you will have no computer, you will use computing resources directly from the net (well, search for SETI, or for CONDOR, or GRID COMPUTING on wikipedia, if you want to know the origins).
And you would be right on all counts, but…
… I do not believe that I could be a good sci-fi writer.
In business as in writing, I am good at something much simpler: picking up seemingly unconnected items, and connecting them.
And then, trying to model the potential decision paths, assigning an instinctive, real-time probability, and then spitting out the outcome that I expect closer to turning into reality, before adding further derived events, and so on.
It is funny.
And the more you do it, the faster your “reprocessing speed” becomes.
Why? Because connecting unconnected items builds unexpected patterns in your brain, that eventually will need just one piece of the puzzle to bring back to mind a full string or chain or train of thought.
But you need to constantly “feed the monster”, by seeing every single item or event as an excuse to “learn”, “file”, “index”, “connect”.
Ok. If you like this game, or do it, we are in the same club.
If you do not- bring in your network somebody who does.
It is usually the person that is a walking library index- your “institutional memory”.
The person who knows who knows the answer to your questions. Or knows in which book or library (digital or otherwise) item you can find the answer.
How does this relate to the “memories of the cloud”?
Well, as part of my experiments in applying new technologies to business processes and other decision-making patterns, few years ago it happened that I had to share some pictures and movies from an Italian dinner.
But not everybody had an e-mail address.
So, I went online, and I found stage6.divx.com, where I could store also movies, up to 2GB each (ok, eventually it closed down), provided that… it was in DivX format.
There, I built few “thematic channels”, focused on travels, cooking, new media.
And a community of over 400 readers.
It was a beta-test, so, once in a while, a message popped-up: we are feeding the hamster.
Give something free to people, and they take it for granted. And start being abusive.
I wonder why people accept Windows Vista, that updates itself few times a week, and instead complain about free services.
But that’s the way it is, isn’t it?
Eventually, it became tiresome, to see all that flaming.
So, to defuse the tension, I started writing about my concern for the overdfed hamsters.
Out of that, I created a United Hamster Front, for the liberation of exploited working hamsters (ok, I merged Pelizza da Volpedo Fourth State, Marx, and OECD Guidelines for Multinational Companies- that’ s the result 
)
Eventually, I “discovered” that in reality the hamsters were the real power spinning the wheels of our economy 
So, I became the “scribe” of the UHF (a.k.a. PR).
And it came out a Big Brotheresque monthly magazine, that had also a facebook group (now closed), and eventually a website.
It was funny- whenever there was something that required a multinational, or supranational solution, here comes a new agreement between the hamsters’ representatives.
I will eventually bring it back online, but for the time being is offline (well, saved online, actually).
Therefore, each item talking about this alternative reality was solidly grounded on actual news, actual technology, and recently or not-so-recently published research.
And the same happened with the “memories”.
Because, beside my previous research on SETI model for distributed computing, and CONDOR, I added some bits and pieces from Artificial Intelligence toying (once, I knew quite well PROLOG, a language that had been selected by Japan to be used for the 5th generation computers), Playstation 2 vectorial facility programming guidelines and neural networks, various sci-fi, and… a life as a bookworm
And… I saw that here and there Google applied for patents on seemingly unrelated technologies, that made sense if you wanted to have a self-powered, offshore computing “cloud”, as sealand (search on Wikipedia for this), but much more advanced.
So, here it comes the “memories of the cloud”, and my half-jokingly assumption that, one day, Google and Wikipedia will be declared shared resources of the humanity, and, along with Internet access, a shared common basic right.
Hey, consider that the ITU (International Telecom Union) not so long ago wrote that, as part of the initiatives to overcome the digital divide, Lesotho was the last country to join the telecom revolution.
Moreover- countries that never invested in land-based telecom (e.g. some African countries) happen to have skipped the copper-wire telecom phase, and moved directly onto the satellite, radio, and mobile computing.
To complete the picture, companies as Nokia forecast, in the end, that mobiles will become commodities, and instead the services delivered by their mobiles, and the leverage that they can command by setting the standards (nothing new, here) will make the difference.
Come back in few days, and I will start adding updated links to relevant technologies.
What’s next? I do no know.
Maybe… embedded Android, instead of embedded RFID.
Or… “I got you under my skin” (yes, play the song here- I cannot, otherwise I will get a DMCA lawsuit )
Also, on the front page of this blog you will see information to what has been updated.
Have fun, and let me know if there is something you would like to talk about.
Tags: behind, cloud, concept, condor, creative, divx, google, memories, of, seti, stage6, the, wikipedia, writing