I am a Google Zealot. This is nothing, new, especially to those that know me. There are many, many aspects of my identity and the data that goes along with it, which are tied to one or more Google-related products. This is not to say that my life is an open-book, prone to scrutiny by random web-users from Buenos Aires or anything. I’m quite careful about the information that I opt to post online, as should everyone of course.

However, I was organizing/clearing out some items in Gmail the other day, when my eyes casually fell upon the indicator at the bottom of the screen that lets you know how much space you have left in the ever-expanding Google datastore. “You…blablabla…3% of 7400MB. Wow, 7400MB is a lot of-…wait. 3% I’ve got about 250MB of stuff on here.” I sat back and thought about that number, drawing relatively silly, almost cartoonish analogs just to get a sense of how much data that really is.

~230 floppy disks (remember those?).
~17,000 average (15K) Word documents, or about as many email messages of similar size.
~125,000 Twitter posts (to get even sillier, this is roughly equivalent to 14 tweets per hour, for a year)

That’s quite a bit of data!

…Sorry.

Then I wondered what I would say if a company were to come to me and say “Hey. So would you let me follow you around for a year and record what you say 14 times an hour? Oh and we’re not going to pay you for this information either. Oh and we’re also going to use this info to show you some advertising here and there.” Were I walking around just going about my daily life, I *might* have a problem with this. I mean, I don’t know if my shower-stall rendition of “Poker Face” is anything I want people listening to, never mind recording (Note: I do not actually sing in the shower.)

But the fact of the matter is, as I mentioned before, I’m making a conscious decision to post information online. As such, I’m aware that when using a Google service/product (for free), that information might actually be looked at. This is not to say that I’m allowing them to do whatever they want with it, mind you. Depending on the context (more on that in a second), I usually take a conservative approach and just presume that whatever post online will be considered public domain. Period.

What’s this about context you say? Well, truth be told, there are in fact some small corners of the internet that are marginally more “obscure” than others. I’m not talking about seedy underground file-sharing sites or any other “non http” source. I’m referring to the fairly niche clusters of community-oriented sites, blogs, forums and portals that serve members with similar interests. ArsTechnica, xkcd, Orchid Forums, and even certain social networking groups are just a few examples. Popular in their own right, and yet focused enough to attract users who search for information within a particular subset of info.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t be cognizant of material that you post in these instances, but it does tend to be the case that the level of familiarity amongst users in these sub-cultures is high enough to allow certain things (Vacation photos, discussions regarding family members etc…) to pass. But I digress.

As time goes on, more and more of your information is going to end up in the cloud. It is inevitable. The netbook segment of the hardware market is exploding. Businesses are adopting cloud infrastructure, enabling their employees more flexibility and freedom to work wherever they want to, physically separated from their information/data. Data storage limits are at a point where petabyte thumb drives (~1,000,000 Gigabytes, people) aren’t that far off. As far as cost/benefit goes, it just makes more sense (for now). We look at the concept of “unlimited storage space” today, in very much the same way we looked at the concept of smart-phones 5 years ago. Nifty sounding tech, but there are too many limitations to make it feasible for the consumer market… look how that turned out. So as this data migration occurs, it just makes sense to realize that parts of our identity are going to do the same.

I’m allowed 2 TNG references in once post.

Here are some quick points to ponder that have me wondering about… well, just about everything.

1) According to Nielsen, The Weather Network was the 4th most accessed site (in Canada) on mobile phones in Q1/2009. They beat out Yahoo Mail, Gmail, iTunes, Google Maps, MSN Games, and YouTube. Windows LiveMail, Google Search and Facebook took the top 3 spots.

Think about this. 674,000 people were in a position where they needed to access information that is questionably accurate at the best of times. Further, it’s winter in Canada (Q1 2009). You do not need a network of trained meteorologists to tell you that it’s going to be COLD.

2) I’ve decided to use the Twitter account that I had abandoned 3 seconds after signing up for it upon its birth, to actually, genuinely see what the fuss is all about. I don’t know if I plan on updating it. I want to see if I can establish a really ecclectic list of people to follow for starters. My first reaction? Following Brent Spiner is equal parts amazing, creepy, and disturbingly addictive. I’d definitely suggest checking out his feed.

“ALARM! ALARM! Someone has breached the security system! “Ernst, Ernst, to me! (learned that from Picard) STAT! (learned that from ER)”

3) The same could be said about any specialized industry, but I’ve always found the task of describing what I do to be a difficult task, especially when the person asking isn’t in the industry (specifically if said person is older and happens to be in my family). I usually start off explaining a particular project, stepping back to mention that it’s in the Digital Marketing space, stepping back once more to mention that it’s just marketing with a particular technology spin to it, and finally I resort to grunting “I do computers.” This is usually met with a lightbulb reaction and a remark similar to “Ah yes. My friend/your cousin Jane is a programmer too!” It’s usually at that point that my soul dies a little and I start fantasizing about violently dramatic ways to escape the conversation and/or the room.