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A crowd for personal clouds

Tomorrow evening, Tuesday, will be a meetup I wish I could attend in San Francisco. The subject is personal clouds.

We’re not talking about storage here, though that’s part of it, just like storage is part of your PC or your phone. We’re talking about your own personal space, which you control, on the Net, and not just on your devices. We’re talking about your own personal operating system: the platform for your enterprise of one. We’re talking about the place where you stand as you manage not just your own data, but your relationships with other people, various services, the Internet of Things, and your contacts—meaning your real social network (the one you define, your own way). It might be self-hosted, or physically elsewhere on the Net; doesn’t matter, long as it’s yours alone, and secure. That is, not contained in somebody else’s service. (Though you can engage one for that, if you like. On your terms.)

Personal clouds are a new concept, but central to what I (and many others) have been working on for years with ProjectVRM and related efforts. (Some of those will be there too.) It’s where personal computing, personal networking, personal storage and personal autonomy and control all meet — or should, once the tech gets built out.

It’s early in the history of wherever this thing is going to go, which is why going to this thing is a good idea.

Register here.

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Doc Searls

3 responses to “A crowd for personal clouds”

  1. Mike Warot Avatar
    Mike Warot

    Part of that personal cloud will have to be social file systems. I think that we all need ways we can share photos with each other (my little pet project) in ways other than uploading them to flickr. We need ways in which the files, and especially access to the files, and their metadata are also shared.

    Doc, I’ve got somewhere around 600 gigabytes of photos and video from the past 15 years that I’ve taken. I assume you’ve got something like that as well. Just giving someone access is a non-starter because who wants to look through 300,000 photos? I’ve done it about 5 times in my life, each time because of loss of metadata due to transfers, hard drive failures, etc.

    Getting past that, if we could share subsets of our stuff, in such a way that we share metadata (in both directions!), you could add names to people I don’t recognize, rate things, add other photos of the same event, etc.

    There are a lot of things that bulk posting of web pages doesn’t accommodate.

    This is all true for photos, and I can’t even imaging 1% of the other things that can’t be done for lack of better sharing tools.

    We need to share stuff in much richer ways… I want to talk to anyone who is interested.

    –Mike–

    Reply
  2. surplex Avatar
    surplex

    Thank you doc for sharing this event. Luckily there we some tickets on Eventbrite left.

    When I am reading about this topic I always need to think of how we can store our memorys in a big cloud / social network e.g. doing what Google Glasses are capable of but without the glasses.
    How would you like to relive your best memories in HD Quality on a screen instead of only in your brain?

    Reply
  3. no internet access Avatar
    no internet access

    @surplex: Well said.

    Reply

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