"The entry of the Google App Engine into the "Data Stores in the Cloud" arena on April 7, 2008 increases the number of high-profile Storage as a Service (StaaS?) players to three. Here's are brief highlights of the three entrants' features in the order of their arrival as beta versions" [Note: Not updated since 2008-05-06?]

More than a year old, but still useful...?

The emergence of the networked information economy is unleashing two powerful forces. On one hand, easy access to high-speed networks is empowering individuals. People can now discover and consume information resources and services globally from their homes. Further, new social computing approaches are inviting people to share in the creation and edification of information on the Internet. Empowerment of the individual-or consumerization-is reducing the individual's reliance on traditional brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of new and emerging virtual ones. Second, ubiquitous access to high-speed networks along with network standards, open standards and content, and techniques for virtualizing hardware, software, and services is making it possible to leverage scale economies in unprecedented ways. What appears to be emerging is industrial-scale computing-a standardized infrastructure for delivering computing power, network bandwidth, data storage and protection, and services. Consumerization and industrialization beg the question "Is this the end of the middle?"; that is, what will be the role of "enterprise" IT in the future? Indeed, the bigger question is what will become of all of our intermediating institutions? This volume examines the impact of IT on higher education and on the IT organization in higher education.

What about privacy in an era of cloud computing? If I store my data in a cloud, is the data in a "closed container" and therefore private under the 4th Amendment? Or is putting data in a cloud analogous to giving the numbers I dial on my phone to the phone company?

The physical and informational barriers we once used to differentiate between our "private" and "public" selves are being eroded by technology, and the erosion is accelerating. If we persist in utilizing a zero-sum, spatial conception of privacy to implement the Fourth Amendment, we will render it ineffective as a guarantor of privacy in the face of arbitrary government action. If we continue along this path, the Fourth Amendment will become, in effect, an artifact - a device that protects against a limited class of real-world intrusions (which will become increasingly unnecessary given the other alternatives).

Towards the end-goal of a thorough comprehension of the field of cloud computing, and a more rapid adoption from the scientific community, we propose in this paper an ontology of this area which demonstrates a dissection of the cloud into five main layers, and illustrates their interrelations as well as their inter-dependency on preceding technologies. The contribution of this paper lies in being one of the first attempts to establish a detailed ontology of the cloud.

Informational self-determination refers to the ability of individuals to exercise personal control over the collection, use and disclosure of their personal information by others. It forms the basis of modern privacy laws and practices around the world. [...] At the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario (IPC), we have long advocated a strong role for individuals in managing their personal information, not just by exercising their privacy rights under Ontario law, but also by becoming better informed and using privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). [...] This paper explores what will be possible if proper digital identity services are deployed and the full power of Cloud computing is realized.

This report discusses the issue of cloud computing and outlines its implications for the privacy of personal information as well as its implications for the confidentiality of business and governmental information. [...] The World Privacy Forum is a non-profit public interest research and consumer education group.

"This post is my attempt to disentangle and examine the topic of "Internet platform" in detail. I will go at it by identifying three distinct approaches to providing an Internet platform, and project forward on where I think each of the three approaches will go. At best, I might be able to help make a new landscape clear. At worst, hopefully I can at least provide one framework for future discussion."

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

This document is intended to initiate a conversation that will bring together the emerging cloud computing community (both cloud users and cloud providers) around a core set of principles. We believe that these core principles are rooted in the belief that cloud computing should be as open as all other IT technologies.

While the debate on the actual definition of cloud computing rages on, it seems that a whole new cloud computing vocabulary is rapidly emerging. I thougt I'd list some of the new terms I'm seeing with brief definitions, examples of usage and references to discussions related to these terms.