As those of us who blog on Enterprise 2.0 have been pegged as counter-cultural revolutionaries and labeled “Hippies,” I thought I would extend the metaphor.
My hard disk on my laptop crashed this week. Without warning, one minute my data was there, the next minute it was gone. And no, of course I never ran backups. I initially panicked. But, slowly, I realized that most of my”work” was high above my desk… in the cloud. Whether it was documents people emailed me, spreadsheets I was working on, presentations, even my photos– most of what I really need and care about is on the web, not on my computer. My email (with all documents attached) is on my online email servers (Google mail, my own web-based ISP mail), the wiki I’ve been collaborating on (SocialText), my personal photo accounts (Flickr, Snapfish), and even good background material on the Enterprise 2.0 market on the wiki at Itensil. Further, every web site/blog that has had any importance to me is cataloged at Del.icio.us.; my daily blog reads are on NetVibes; the groups I participate in are all online (Google groups); I’m even part of a social network on Ning. I’m sure there are more proofs of my web life (oh, yeah, Second Life). So hard disk? I hardly knew ya.
Inhale the web. It’s good for your new millennium health.
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So with you and Elmo’s disks crashing, I realize that I need to put more of my stuff online.
Actually, before commenting without thinking things through, you’re totally right. All of my actual work? Online. Email is done entirely through webmail; I don’t keep anything locally. Code? All on foreign servers.
I need to find a good solution for my music/movie/tvshow collection, though. That one’s going to be painful.
Today’s Links
[...] Normally I don’t write about other peoples blogs, but this one really caught my eye: [...]
Susan – I wish I could add more but..living in the cloud beats the crap out of living with the worry of what might happen with the Blue Screen of Death.
[...] Susan Scrupski’s must read post called Stay High All the Time encapsulates how I’ve learned to live my working (and a lot of my private) life. But not before losing all my data. How times have changed. [...]
Ha Ha Ha!
This sounds like me too! I have all my business information in Salesboom.com, my email in gmail and my blog work is online too! Who needs to carry a laptop anymore! Mine has no data whatsoever!
This is Life 2.0!
Thanks Dennis. It’s funny you mention Vista. I had a choice to have my laptop replaced by Dell as it was under warranty, or to just replace the hard drive. I chose to replace the hard drive even though I had to pay out of pocket for it at the local PC repair shop. Reason? I wanted to avoid Vista. Further, I have decided in this iteration to avoid MS Office apps (including Outlook) for as long as I possibly can. I never was a Microsoft hater, but the convenience of online beats local vulnerability and thorny software upgrades.
Maybe enterprises aren’t saying much, but let’s hope they’re listening.
What a great way to express the life I similarly had to embrace a couple of years back. But only after I’d lost a ton of stuff forever. How things have changed.
Anyone for Vista? (I suspect the silence might be deafening.)