It’s taken me this long – over 40 posts – to realize that the “digital world” I have been talking about is actually a “world” that can be described in terms of the Cloud.

Once I’ve done that – in this post, the third in an epic mini-series – I can recast the original two questions of the introduction to these:

• How can we model the relationship between the Real World and The Cloud?
• What comes of applying this model?

and answer the first question. These questions and their answers are important because The Cloud is now, and is going to be more, an important part of our lives, bound up with the way we work with the Web.

So.

The Cloud is an object. Nothing in the definition of Cloud Computing mentions people and so nothing in my personal draft working definition of the Cloud mentions people. People interact with the Cloud in three ways, it seems to me. They use the Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Platform and Cloud Software Service offerings.

Of the three it is only the Cloud Software Service that offers Cloud-based applications that allow people to represent themselves as individuals on the Web, using their own data – their own personal information – stored in the Cloud (the storage capacity of the Cloud).

My old description of the “digital” world was: “a world whose core is the Internet, whose surface is the Web and which is populated by Web representations of Real People – Digital Inhabitants and others – who use Web-based applications.”

The new description of the “digital” world (Cloud World) runs like this:

The Cloud World is made of The Cloud and people (Real People who use certain Cloud-based applications to represent themselves on the Web) – Digital Inhabitants and others. These people use certain other Cloud-based applications to work with data stored in the Cloud.

For my personal draft working definition of The Cloud see the previous post.

We’ll see how far that takes me. The whole notion of “Web-based” applications was a false lead.

I tried to think of a name for this Cloud World and came up with cldwrld (pronounced “cloud world”) which expresses the speed and compression of this Now Computer Era (see next post) we live in.

People use the resources of the Cloud by giving a correct user id/password combination. This is also, then, a key to entry to cldwrld.

The only link between the Real World and cldwrld is the cable that carries the electricity between them.

So that’s the first question answered and I will update the welcome! section to reflect this post.

Answering the second question is really to answer the question: How does the Cloud affect our lives now and how will it? And that answer is the one I am going to look for here.