Living in the Cloud - My New Year's Resolution from 2011

I'm moving home (out of my parents, over to Yorkshire for a new job) in the next couple of weeks and I'm doing something similar for entertainment. Rather than shelling out £12 a month for a broadcast TV licence for my new house, I'm using that money on a decent internet connection (S Yorkshire has subsidised FTTC broadband), buying a nicer monitor instead of a TV, and just watching recorded and on-demand stuff online.<p>Having said that, I'm not sure about the other stuff. I actually <i>like</i> going out into town and buying my groceries. It's social interaction, it supports local shops, it's a great way to get to know the place and the people. I could easily sit in front of a computer, pull up Tesco.com and order stuff in, but it's not the same. I'd actually question whether that's even "living in the cloud" - surely it's just internet shopping as it's been since about 1999?<p>The same goes for radio. Yes, you can switch on Spotify, Pandora, Rdio or any one of those services and hear your favourite songs, non-stop and commercial-free. But who introduces you to new artists, who gives you news and opinion, who provides the bits between the songs, tells you what's happening in town that weekend, tells you when the road's closed? Spotify is just your musical bubble, in a long, boring loop. I couldn't live without my radio in the room. (Disclaimer: I work in FM radio.)<p>The cloud is great, the cloud is an innovation, the cloud is very useful for many, many things (I use Dropbox, Google Docs, iPlayer, and so on heavily.) But to move your entire life online? I work all week sitting in front of a PC. I couldn't transform my free time into that too.

Someone should mention: this "cloud" is not actually a cloud, but relies on physical things to exist. At both ends, loads of electric current is needed. It relies on mining to bring the infrastructure, and it replaces your own information management with facilities managed by people you'll never meet and companies you'll barely know. But you have to trust them and agree to their terms, and become their customer.<p>Living in the cloud could be the most you've ever sold out without knowing it.<p>My advice: keep a few books. Bookshelves can be left in standby mode for years without needing a recharge. When people come over you can hand them a book, maybe an art book, and they will enjoy flicking through the pages. The UX of a book is top notch. Leave and rotate a few on the coffee table (if you have a coffee table, or is that in the cloud too?).

Interesting resolution. I wish Leah went into some of the negative affects living in the "cloud" had, rather than just promote all the services she uses.

This is awesome. It's showing how more and more of today's society is moving to niche marketplaces. Roughly 30-35% of Leah's "Cloud" living was simply offloaded to marketplaces that perform a niche service.<p>Of course, I realize I might be using the word marketplaces loosely.

I think this list is super cool, but I think it'd actually be pretty expensive to live like this.

As someone who lives in the cloud already, and has been for a few years, it's very easy and efficient. I use Chrome's sync to have all my bookmarks everywhere, lastpass to keep my passwords, pandora for my music, google reader for my news, github for my code, gmail and google calendar, and dropbox with a truecrypt blob for ssh keys, gpg keys and a few other things.<p>It's not hard to live in the cloud you just have to deal with a service possibly going away or falling apart security wise. If you make the proper precautions it's all good.

Interesting that this is mostly about lowering costs by exploiting, and encouraging, the increase in liquidity of many goods and services, facilitated by tech infrastructure.

I'm still stuck on the web :-(