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So here's the real trick: cloud computing is real. Everything is moving into the cloud, in whole or in part. The utility layer of cloud computing will be just that, a utility, without outsized profits. But the cloud platform, like the software platform before it, has new rules for competitive advantage. And chief among those advantages are those that we've identified as "Web 2.0", the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud. TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function: * as topic summaries for speeches and written works * as blog tool or website analysis for search engine optimization (SEO) * for visual analysis of survey data * as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world * for data mining a text corpus * for helping writers and students reflect on their work * as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start * as resumes in a single glance * as visual poetry

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.

Auto-scaling is the ability (with certain cloud infrastructure management tools like enStratus-in a limited beta through the end of the year) to add and remove capacity into a cloud infrastructure based on actual usage. No human intervention is necessary. It sounds amazing-no more overloaded web sites. Just stick your site into the cloud and come what may! You just pay for what you use. But I don't like auto-scaling.

Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data.

A tag cloud is a list of words in different sizes and colors, with or without a sense of depth (3D), meant to represent the statistical importance of keywords mentioned in a particular document base (a blog, a website, twitter,…). It serves as an indicator of the relative importance of the use of certain ideas in the document base at hand. It is a bottom-up, very fuzzy method for the synthesis of knowledge from an arbitrarily big aggregate of (text) data. Because it rests entirely on statistics, very often there is absolutely no relationships between the keywords of a tag cloud. Worse even, if they existed (by pure chance), there is absolutely no way of finding out about the meaning of those relationships.

Tag clouds are cool, informative, appealing representations about what's happening in your blog, or anywhere else. With ZoomClouds you can put in a matter of minutes a tag cloud in your site, based on whichever RSS feed you like.

Media Cloud is a project that tracks news content comprehensively - providing open, free, and flexible tools. This will allow unprecedented quantitative analysis of media trends. For instance, some of our driving questions are: 1. Do bloggers introduce storylines into mainstream media or the other way around? 2. What parts of the world are being covered or ignored by different media sources? 3. Where do stories begin? 4. How are competing terms for the same event used in different publications? 5. Can we characterize the overall mix of coverage for a given source? 6. How do patterns differ between local and national news coverage? 7. Can we track news cycles for specific issues? 8. Do online comments shape the news?

Semantic Cloud is the API that powers semantic search engine SenseBot and contextual linking tool for bloggers LinkSensor. The API supports SOAP and REST protocols (HTTP GET). The idea is to empower semantic startups or any ventures that are looking to utilize an affordable high-quality semantic solution to build their applications. Semantic API features include: * extraction of semantic concepts from a page or document; * creating a "semantic cloud" of concepts describing a group of documents; * generating a multi-document summary of a set of pages; * generating an essay on a topic based on a set of documents. Multiple parameters allow the client to control the type and format of results.

The Drizzle project is building a database optimized for Cloud and Net applications. It is being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-cpu/core architecture. The code is originally derived from MySQL.

People are changing the way that they consume online information, as well as their expectations about its delivery. The social nature of the Web brings with it an expectation of interaction with information and modern Web design is reflecting that. There are now alternate forms of navigation including the ability to browse by user, tag clouds, tabbed navigation etc. Advances in technology along with these shifts in user expectations are affecting the way that information is laid out on a webpage. Today's websites are aiming for intuitive and usable interfaces which are continuously evolving in response to user needs. Website designers are approaching information design differently and designing simple, interactive websites which incorporate advancements in Web interface design, current Web philosophies, and user needs. Information design for the New Web is simple, it is social, and it embraces alternate forms of navigation.

Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications.

Database systems are notorious for being hard to use. It is even more difficult to integrate data from multiple sources and collaborate on large data sets with people outside your organization. Without an easy way to offer all the collaborators access to the same server, data sets get copied, emailed and ftp'd--resulting in multiple versions that get out of sync very quickly. Today we're introducing Google Fusion Tables on Labs, an experimental system for data management in the cloud. It draws on the expertise of folks within Google Research who have been studying collaboration, data integration, and user requirements from a variety of domains. Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing. Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing. We plan to iteratively add new features to the systems as we get feedback from users.