The business of news is a forward thinking one, where reporting on current events brings eyes and mind on the events of the future.

The New York Times has always had an eye on the past as well, by maintaining a very careful inventory of all the output of the past. Just last month, the fully searchable content of the Times from 1851 to 1922 was made available on the web. The content comprises more than 15 million articles.

The chief software architect for the Times, Derek Gottfrid, decided that the job of maintaining all of that content was too much to do in house, Instead, the content was put ‘into the cloud’ on servers owned by Amazon. The result of this is called Time Machine, and Gottfrid states that without the help of Amazon, the project would never have been undertaken.

The trend is on its way, with big players like the New York Times buying into the idea. And there are more than enough players to accommodate those who look forward.

from Newsweek

If you thought Amazon sold only books, you probably think Google is just a search engine. Both Amazon and Google—along with Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Yahoo and other small players—have just started rolling out cloud computing services. Get used to hearing that expression. In April, Gartner Research dubbed it “the biggest buzz phrase of 2008, [but] little understood until 2009.” At its most basic, cloud computing is the ability to use software and data on the Internet (a.k.a., the cloud) instead of on your hard drive.

Ten years ago if you wanted to do something with your PC you needed to buy software and install it. The ascent of Web 2.0—to deploy an older buzz phrase—is making that practice obsolete. “Suddenly, what cloud computing allows is for businesses and individuals to use it as if it were their own. It makes computing a heck of a lot less expensive,” says tech journalist Nicholas Carr, author of “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.”

The players like the New York Times will not be changing methods or locations quickly, so any changes in the pricing of Internet usage will not deter their efforts. The pricing will undoubtedly affect some smaller players, but hopefully these larger players will be using large quantities of these services, and will allow the ISPs and maintainers of the backbone to see the benefit of large expansion right away, This should push the idea of volume pricing, with better deals for those with large usage, and perhaps the ‘little guys’, like individuals, will be able to escape the devil of metered usage.

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