I have several blog entries swirling around my head, but since Will Richardson’s post Is My Head (And My Life) In the Clouds was the first one I read this morning (link via Twitter), I’ll start there.  The possibility of living online is something I’ve been thinking and writing about since 2006.  My first post was prompted by this article from TechCrunch.  As I mentioned there, I had just gotten a nice desktop MacPro and was finding it somewhat annoying to try to juggle between two computers.  I was experimetning with syncing but never certain the right things were being synced in the right direction.  Moving everything online just made sense.  Now, nearly two years later, I often joke that I hope Google doesn’t turn out to be the anti-Christ because I have sold my soul to them.  I use gmail to pull in my email from other accounts.  I did learn the importance of having one account that doesn’t forward since you need a way for Google to email your password when your old brain just can’t seem to get it right and you’re in a hotel room with your 3×5 password cards in your desk drawer at home.  I use Google calendar and have at least one client that can share their calendars with me.  And I find Google docs to be a lifesaver when I’m writing on the road.  You can probably name the rest: LibraryThing keeps track of my books; Diigo stores my favorites and allows me to share with a group; Netvibes organizes all my reading material.  I still like Keynote for creating presentations but more and more of them are ending up at my wikispaces account.  Finally, I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr as a place to pull it all together.

Plus, we are saved from problems like the one I encountered this weekend.  I got a call from a woman who was using Mail 3.0 on her new Macintosh and found that she couldn’t always send emails.  It was a random event: she would send one email but then the very next one wouldn’t go.  Later, when she tried again, it would send just fine.  It didn’t take very much digging to discover that this is a known problem, but evidently one without a ready solution.  I recommended that, if she wished to continue to use a mail client, she download Thunderbird since it appeared to be problem-free.  But I found myself saying that I wasn’t familiar with Mail since I do all my stuff online.  So, in answer to Will’s question, a whole lot of my life is in the clouds.  I worry a bit about trusting my data to someone else, but agree with his comment, “The potential reward of easy collaboration and sharing at this point at least outweigh the risk of losing files.”  And, when I hear stories like this one where a user is held captive by a non-functioning software program, I’m convinced I’m headed in the right direction.