The bottom line is that a well run cloud will be much more fault tolerant, robust and scalable than anything an individual or a company could install while at the same time being more economical.

Personalisation has long been an important aspect of knowledge workers – to arrange knowledge and information in the way that makes sense to the user so he can work in the most efficient way.

Good knowledge managers have also known that enforcing a way of working that matches the corporate way, the taxonomical way, is also bad because most of the time “my way of working” and “my mental model of information” doesn’t equal “the corporate way”.

Email is a good example of a great app that allows for high levels of personalisation. Fortunately, the corporate taxonomists don’t enforce a structure that users need to keep their emails in.

Enforcing a cloud view, however, is probably as bad as enforcing a taxonomic view of the world. It’s still only one way to look at a user’s own information, but it probably won’t be the user’s preferred view. The biggest tag may not necesarily be the one that they need to keep tabs on today or for the next month. What if the user has thousands of tags?

IMHO, discussing the need for folksonomic and taxonomic views are important, but the ability for the individual to organise information in the way that he thinks, to be able to personalise information so that it reflects what ever way they work, is the important factor for all knowledge workers.

I posted on this a few weeks ago, asking if it was time for an “Internet File System” to complement the emerging Internet OS’s and allow for separation between applications and storage:

http://techfold.com/2007/04/18/time-for-an-internet-file-system-ifs/

Check out that mocked up Google Docs “Save to: .mac, box.net, etc” screenshot.