Well, not really. Although I entirely missed the release of the romantic Hugh Grant comedy Music and Lyrics (2007), that is where this tune comes from.

Grant plays a washed-up pop icon who’s being asked to write an overnight hit for a fledgling teen star. You can tell where this is headed.

I could just direct you to the YouTube video, but have a look at this lip dub video which features no one else but social cyborg Kevin Lim from theory.isthereason. Now that’s funny.

Obviously, it’s where avatars (in computing) come from: subcultures heavily influenced by SciFi, fantasy and gaming. But after almost two decades on the internet, you’d think they too would have gone through some shiny-pastel web 2.0 phase. Not in the least.

I’ve been doing a bit of research into avatars for work. It seems they can have a special role in education and commerce. Because an avatar is supposed to be a neutral character, it can be helpful as a teacher or an adviser.

That is why some of the avatars that made it into the mainstream have been (female) figures like IKEA’s Anna, Microsoft’s Ms Dewey or Ananova, the now defunct newscaster. Except for the first Anna, you could hardly call these successful though.

Google the term avatar today, and some of the top sites you’ll run into are services like IMVU, the instant messenger for teens, and Moove. Look at the screenshots from these sites, and tell me that you either a) like these childish self-misrepresentations for the morbidly insecure or b) think that’s who they maybe should have cast for the I’m a PC adverts instead of Seinfeld - who actually looks a bit like an avatar himself.

I don’t know. Serious scholarship could never get enough of avatars: how they were going to dominate our virtual-reality controlled worlds in the future. Or how they’ll help achieve

intuitive user interaction for websites … and enable developers to construct websites based on anthropomorphic metaphors

That last bit from MetaFace by the way, the Virtual Human Markup Language Project, who call them Embodied Conversational Agents. If you prefer, you may call them Virtual Interaction Characters or Anthropomorphic Interaction Agents too. Whatever. I think they’re ugly. They look like pimps and hookers.

So, except for Face Your Manga on Twitter, avatars don’t seem to catch on. Perhaps, like some of the more lifelike robots, they freak us out? Or maybe the web has moved too far into our real-life, our day-to-day identities, that we prefer a regular profile pic over a scary unreal cartoon character?

Or maybe someone will have to just reinstate Clippy soon.

In 2006, there were 11,600 US residents living in Belgium (Dutch source, page 155). I’ve met a few of them (a couple dozen, source: my own memory) and over time, I’ve assigned them to three main categories.

We’re not from here

These are the tourists. They make that very clear. They may be clad in plaid trousers and are often over 100. Sometimes they are younger. In that case they talk about pot and beer a lot, but are too young to have tasted either.

They’re friendly types. The old ones think everything here is cute, the younger ones think everything here is awesome. They’re disappointed when not every city here looks like Bruges. They don’t get how we survive without Burger King.

We’d rather be home

These are the expats. They make that very clear too. They live and work here. Their children go to school here. They have Belgian friends. But… never ever will they assimilate. They’re Americans at heart and only passing through. Often they resent being here.

They’re the preppy types: succesful enough to be sent abroad from work, but not so succesful they were sent to London or Paris. They regret this and tell you quite frankly. They’re disappointed not every city looks like uptown Brussels. They don’t get how we survive without living in the US ourselves.

We wish we could stay

These are the exiles. They don’t need to make this clear - it shows in every way. Exiles live and breathe continental Europe. They drink Pastis and special beers because they like it. They love sitting on a café terrace in the autumn sun. They ride bikes, speak our language.

They’re the outsiders. They were never at home in the US. They’re geeks and dorks, outcasts, punks. They’re often the intellectuals, atheists, freethinkers. They’re socialists or vegetarians. Gays and lesbians. Writers. Designers. Actors. Directors.

Their hearts beat to a gentler drum. An American in Paris, the Gershwin tune. Un’altra canzone.

And every single one of them thinks and hopes Obama will win. So they can have their triumph. So they could go back. But only as tourists. Then they’ll come home again. To Europe.

According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is to be understood as

a style of computing where IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet (‘in the cloud’)

While that definition remains vague, many of us are using cloud services already.

Typically, we think of the cloud as the combination of (free) services that you use to store and manage your data, such as Gmail or Flickr. After all, the cloud is considered a synonym for the internet.

Technically, however, the cloud could be anything from Google data centres to your own host. But even the ISP which stores your emails and your own machine can be considered part of the cloud: whenever you sync your email to Gmail, when you use P2P networks, when you post crash reports or usage stats (e.g. scrobbling to Last.fm or Wakoopa) you are, in a way, contributing to the cloud.

4 ways to the clouds

SaaS

The term Software as a Service (SaaS) is often used as a synonym for cloud computing (although strictly speaking it isn’t). It implies the ad hoc access to online tools that work as applications. Of course, you will always need another application to access the tool. Google Docs for word processing is an example of that: you do not need to install Word to write a letter – but you do need a browser to access your Google account.

RIA

Rich internet applications are another way of accessing the cloud. In that case, you do not even need a browser. With Adobe’s AIR for instance, all you have to do is install the framework, get the app you need, and you’re set. An AIR app runs on your desktop and communicates with your online service of choice. Twhirl for Twitter is an example of that.

Widgets

Much like RIAs, widgets run on your desktop. Unlike RIAs they do not strictly need a framework. With Vista or OS X they run natively within your operating system. Yahoo! Widgets works in a similar way, although you still need to install the Yahoo! widget engine (formerly Konfabulator) to run them. And Google has its own sidebar with widgets too. In a way, widgets are just skinned miniature apps.

Software with services

A final way of accessing the cloud is one that sounds very new and very vague, but promising as well. In fact it’s what Google is doing with Chrome and what Microsoft would like to see with Silverlight. The idea is not to use a separate framework (like Adobe’s AIR), but to present the content in a browser as a separate process.

This becomes most clear in Chrome, where you can unlock a service (say Gmail) and have it run in a separate application window, independent from the main browser process. Silverlight, as I understand it, is also a way to present rich internet content in the browser. So far, I haven’t seen any breakaway usages like with Chrome, but that may soon change.

Current rumours about Windows 7 will have us believe that the successor to Vista will not feature any pre-installed, standalone applications for email or multimedia (read: Mail and Media Player). Instead, Microsoft is looking at a more enhanced way of using their online counterparts: Windows Live and Office Live and Silverlight.

And now, apparently, Microsoft is about to introduce yet another, newer incarnation of Windows – aptly codenamed Cloud. This mystery product seems to involve “software plus services where web-based components supplement functionality of the main desktop software”.

Personally, I think that is in fact the way to go.

The fog

It’s clear that the cloud is everywhere and nowhere. Like the internet, no one owns it. That implies the data is yours… but the service provider owns the tools. In the end, that approach locks you in as much as any proprietary desktop software package would have: if the service changes or collapses, your data is gone.

Furthermore, at any given moment I may have some documents with Google, my mindmaps could be with MindMeister and my wiki with MindTouch. That way, the cloud becomes a thick, dense fog. And if I’m having trouble managing my own stuff, what about people trying to connect with me, using other services and frameworks?

Think: if you want to share your data in the cloud, you have to invite collaborators, viewers, etc. Now you’re not only locked into the service, but into a maze of passwords and guest accounts and you’re not sure what happens next.

The solution

When setting up this new, self-hosted blog, I chose to have my lifestream self-hosted too. That way, I take back part of the cloud and I can share it as I see fit. I may set up a wiki at some point, and if there was some document sharing software, I’d use that too.

The way I see it, I need storage for my data, use an ‘on-the-fly software interface’ to access and share it, and an app to tie it all together. That app could be a browser like chrome or perhaps this new Microsoft Cloud ‘software with services’.

That way, I would have my files on my server, use an online service to edit and share them, and have my desktop application as a gateway. But the files I edit are mine. They’re not locked in and they don’t die when Google does (or goes Evil after all).

Of course, owning your part of the cloud, also means paying for it. But in my view, I think I’d rather pay for that ‘connective software interface’ than for yet another web 2.0 service that effectively owns my data (Flickr locks you out of downloading your own pics, for instance, when your account expires).

I may be all wrong about this, but one thing’s for sure: the cloud, we’re definitely not in it yet.