Is my blog named wrong?

Somehow I found a link to Wordle, a very cool tool that creates word cloud graphics based on text or URLs. Naturally, I ran http://westcoastgrid.blogspot.com through it to see what my grid cloud would look like...



...and promptly found out that my "grid cloud" is actually more of a "cloud cloud."

That last sentence points out several things I've noticed lately:

• Those of us who have been writing about Grid Computing are increasingly writing about cloud computing, and of course that's no surprise. While clouds are opening up the prospect of distributed computing to a much wider audience than ever, using a cloud effectively means possibly managing many machines effectively. Alternatively, it may mean writing software that effectively runs on many machines simultaneously. In either case, the grid computing industry has been thinking about (and solving!) these problems for years. If you want a firsthand look at the expertise these "grid" folks have in "cloud" efforts, hop onto the Google Cloud Computing group and check out Rich Wellner's contributions. As I said, the grid folks have been thinking about these problems for years (albeit in a slightly different implementation).
• The term "Cloud" already has far too many meanings in the marketplace (another parallel to grid, come to think of it)
• If I'm writing more about cloud computing than grid computing, is it time to rename my blog?
  

I've got a few posts I've been thinking about in terms of the intersection of cloud and grid (and where cloud is going) -- I'll try to get back on the blogging bandwagon and pump some of those out.

In the meantime, I'm not changing the name of the blog. It may be an antiquated name, but at least people know where to find me.

Technorati tags: cloud computing