Why I'm buying into the cloud

I’m going to purchase some space on Windows Azure and entering the world of cloud computing.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The primary motivation is to work further with large data sets, especially open data, to improve my journalism 3.0 skills.

I plan to move my blog posts, files photos, videos, and audio into the cloud as well. Hopefully, when the new OpenPublish for Drupal 7 is published in late summer, I’ll be able to migrate my content easily.

NPR is benefiting from the versatility of having APIs. This quote has stuck with me for a while:

“Due to the foresight of folks at NPR before I got there, we had all of our content in an open API. That doesn’t mean developing all of our applications is free, but it enables us to do more much more faster, and much more nimbly. We built our iPad up in matter of a few weeks. Without an API, that would have been impossible, or at least we would have had to stop whatever else we were doing [to build it].” — Vivian Schiller (http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/10/notable-moments-from-the-2010-ona-conference301.html)

Faster and more nimbly – always worth striving for.