My Life in the Clouds

Okay, I’ve finally had enough — after an unexpected and completely dibilitating hard drive crash (aren’t they all?) this weekend, I have, like all victims overcoming tragedy, decided to pickup the pieces and move on.  I am therefore officially making it my goal for 2009 to shift more than two-thirds of my digital existence to the greener pastures of “The Cloud”.

• Goodbye Microsoft Office, hello Google Docs
• Goodbye Quicken, hello Mint
• Goodbye bookmarks, hello Delicious [again]
• Goodbye folders, hello Flickr [exclusively]
• Goodbye iTunes… oh wait :(

IT fanboys may scoff at how quickly I shake off my longheld ties to physical disks and pricey programs, which they will claim to be “more secure”… to which I say:

Anyone willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both. — Benjamin Franklin

Freedom, in this case, is our inalienable right to have our information (and media) at any time, in any place, and displayed on any acceptable device with complete integrity and usefulness; to own this information despite that we do not physically possess it; and to decide one day, on a whim just as impetuous as this one, to move our lives and information from one cloud to another.

“We the people” need a Thomas Payne for the Information Age.