Problems with Online Facilities and Cloud Computing

I am also having an interesting time using everything on the web only, as opposed to PC only.
At the moment it is a bit of a combination - which is probably where things will pan out in the long term - provided that better facilities get put into place to share information between the two worlds.

It is the information storage - ie saving documents, and snippets of information etc - which is really really really bugging me.
I am finding that I am putting the same piece of information into 2 or 3 (sometimes more) different locations, since I haven't settled on a single facility (site) or single interface for where the information goes.
So, for instance, all the information I researched on web services components and user interfaces etc.
I ended up creating all these entries:
1. del.icio.us records and tages
2. google notebook clippings and associated text
3. reply to the discussion forum in Central Desktop on this topic

and then I got the whole discussion forum replies into a single document, using an RSS Feed, and placed it into a TikiWiki page.

I could have also stored the searched entries into my Evernote space, and placed them into my Dokuwiki.

When I get documents from people via email (which is still, unfortunately, the predominant method of sharing information at the moment), I find that I am saving them locally on my PC (well, the one I am using at the time - being the Linux system, although I also use Windows PCs and have to save documents on them as well) and then re-loading them into Google Docs or into Zoho Docs. I have setup some "email-in" capabilities for Evernote and Google Docs and also into a TikiWiki and so also forward the documents into those facilities using the email facilities - but usually I may have to change the names of the documents to be better than what is sent to me (people are so so so bad at naming documents so that others can use them) - and so I mostly use the "mail-in" facilities when I am sending back a document and can set the subject line on the email properly (people's use of subject lines is infinitely worse than their document naming conventions - awful awful awful) and can name the document effectively as well (in relation to the ultimate storage of the document).

It is all a little tedious - I must admit.
It is the correct way to go - keep items online - but the whole ecosystem (online, laptop, applications, services, etc) is really a little broken I think. It really needs an excellent piece of integration work between all these facilities.

And furthermore, I find that I am copying and pasting and re-posting material into different environments.
For instance, this little piece of rant about the use of online facilities is going to go into some sort of blog and then some sort of commentary in another facility where I want to keep this information, as well as in this email (but I don't need the other material in the email) - yet I can't easily do this from a single facility. So I will copy it into a new "document" in Kate (the editor, not a person - but, that would be interesting) and then paste it into the other websites as appropriate.

Keeping everything setup and organised is quite a large task. It may be exacerbated by the fact that I like trying out new facilities, and am still looking for the perfect structure of all the facilities together - but I hold by the initial premise of this post - there is still a long way for all these cloud computing and online facilities to go - even though it is absolutely the direction in which everything needs to head.

style

Style is in no way an embellishment, as certain people think, it is not evean a question of technique; it is, like color with certain painters, a quality of vision, a revelation of a private niverse which each one of us sees and which is not seen by others. he pleasure an artist gives us is to make us know an additional universe.

-- Proust, Marcel "Letters of Marcel Proust", translated by Mina Curtiss, Random House, New York, 1949, edition Helen Marx Books, 2006, page 274

memory

Voluntary memory, which is above all the memory of the intelligence end of the eyes, gives us only the surface of the past without the truth, but when an odor, a taste, rediscovered under entirely different circumstances evoke for us, in spite of ourselves, the past, we sense how different is this past from the one we thought we remembered and which our voluntary memory was painting like a bad painter using false colors.

-- Proust, Marcel "Letters of Marcel Proust", translated by Mina Curtiss, Random House, New York, 1949, edition Helen Marx Books, 2006, pages 272-3

That invisible substance, time

There is a plane geometry and a geometry of space. And so for me the novel is not only plane psycholoy but psychology in space and time. That invisible substance, time, I try to isolate. But in order to do this it was essential that the experience be continuous.

-- Proust, Marcel "Letters of Marcel Proust", translated by Mina Curtiss, Random House, New York, 1949, edition Helen Marx Books, 2006, pages 271-2

a piece of work is a thing which, although born out of ourselves, is still worth more than we are

I feel so strongly that a piece of work is a thing which, although born out of ourselves, is still worth more than we are, that I find it natural to take trouble for it, like a father for his child.

-- Proust, Marcel "Letters of Marcel Proust", translated by Mina Curtiss, Random House, New York, 1949, edition Helen Marx Books, 2006, page 269

time is a process of reckoning that corresponds to no reality

The philosophers have certainly persuaded us that time is a process of reckoning that corresponds to no reality. We know that, but the ancient superstition is so strong that we cannot escape it, and it seems to us that on a given date we are inevitably older

-- Proust, Marcel "Letters of Marcel Proust", translated by Mina Curtiss, Random House, New York, 1949, edition Helen Marx Books, 2006, page 267