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May 03, 2008
Future Compliant, May 3, 2008
Future Compliant May 3 2008
I'm computing in the clouds right now. I've written about this new buzz-word trend before - the idea that all your computing needs will live in the data clouds of the internet, available to you anywhere where you have some bandwidth at your disposal. I'm on record as loving the idea. As much as I like my various computers, I hate being tied down to any single one of them. I've got three different machines that I use for different purposes (although really that could be 2, maybe), and I've had to either move files back and forth between them or just limit one kind of work to one particular machine. For some annoying software (looking at you itunes and audible.com), I'm mostly stuck on one device, but the more I can free my data up, the happier I am.
This week I dived full on in to Google Docs. Indeed I'm using it right now in the coffee shop with my EeePC running linux and using downtown Sarasota's free wi-fi. I'll finish it up later on my other, bigger Ubuntu laptop when I get home. Google Docs made the crucial leap for me recently when they added an off-line component to the software. Up until that point hated the idea that I'd have to be online in order to get work done. That would be pretty worthless on a plane or in an airport that doesn't have free wi-fi or, well, sometimes this coffee shop. That free internet is less than 100% reliable. I didn't even consider using the software before Google remedied that oversight.
Now I've been using it for a week solid, writing not only these blog posts, but also working hard on starting my new novel, the third in my Geek Mafia series. I intend to write the whole first draft of the new book on Google Docs, although I'm saving off a copy in Open Office to my local hard drive every day, just to be safe. Google Docs doesn't have nearly the functionality of a full-on word processor, but it turns out it has all the functions I actually use on a regular basis. I can seamlessly edit the book from each of my computers and not have to worry about synching up different versions. I do have to be a little careful when I work offline that I make sure I upload the latest version from my offline computer before I edit it with another one, but so far that hasn't been a problem.
I'm also interested to see how well the sharing tools work. You can open the documents to other google docs users to either just read or also edit. Since I rely a great deal on the kind and helpful input of friends ad family on my early drafts, it will be interesting to see how many of them I can suck in to using Google Docs' collaborative tools and how useful I will actually find them. I have a couple of other, smaller projects (and one far off, much larger one) that I plan to work with co-authors on, where we would both have access to the document and would build it up together. Google Docs then tracks who made what changes so you can keep on eye on each other's progress and additions. I think that's how it's supposed to work anyway. I'll let you know how it goes.
There are down sides of course. The first one that springs to my mind is privacy. The fact that all my documents and data are sitting on Google's servers somewhere, subject to internal or federal inspection (with or without a warrant?) cannot be ignored. I can say that I would never put anything up on Google Docs that I didn't intend to some day be public. I consider the early drafts of a novel to be private of course, but there's not going to be anything in there that I really want to be forever private. Although in this day in age, if it's something I really want to keep private, then I just never commit it to digital form at all - it's the only way to be safe.
Since I've spent all this space and time recommending a privacy smashing but useful Google app, I want to assuage my paranoid guilt and point you in the direction of a cool tool from the Chaos Computer Club that you can use to help actually preserve your privacy some. It's called anonbox, and it's a private server that lets you set up totally anonymous, one time e-mail programs that you can use to sign up for Web sites and other services that require a real, working e-mail address to use. For example, some government archive sites, many newspaper archive sites, and a wide variety of others all require an e-mail address to set up a "free account." Maybe you have no interest in living forever in their databases, on record as having downloaded a specific file. I can certainly understand that. Anonbox offers a great, free work around for those situations - another fine service from the kings of future compliance, the Chaos Computer Club.
Posted by rdakan at May 3, 2008 09:25 AM