Data clouds

'Bowl of clouds' by
Kevin Dooley under
a CC license

I was sorting out my (digital) photos the other day. Browsing, cropping, retouching, titling, tagging, sharing and all those things that normally follow the transfer of photos from the camera to the computer.

[This is certainly a point where I could say that in the (somewhat) old days, the film days, things were much easier. All one had to do was shoot a film (36 shots at most, which would normally need days, weeks or even months to finish), take it to a store to have it developed and then select a few nice prints for the photo album or, even simpler, stack them in a box and put the box aside. Sharing photos would mean having reprints made, which was not the most pleasant processes, which, in turn, is why many people I know of used to order two sets of prints straight away.]

Regardless, I won't be comparing with the old days on that level. Partly because I enjoy taking photos and I don't mind all the post- steps. The only thing I may be missing a bit is the getting together with friends to show the photos but that's another story.

I do like, however, to preserved photos in some way, in an organised fashion, if possible. I think of them as little pieces of (my) history; bits of memory that will - eventually and inevitably - begin to fade from my mind. In the film days preservation was not really an issue. The prints could last for years, maybe decades. The negatives could/can last for more. Today, digital copies, photo files are thought to last forever. Correct? Well, not precisely. They can last for as long the medium that holds them lasts. And here is where problems begin to arise.

The data volumes we are talking about are rapidly increasing. Modern cameras make shooting photos really easy. They won't be making us pros but for sure they give us a very high success rate in terms of "acceptable" photos. Those are the ones that we are likely to want to preserve. With increasing camera sensor sizes and pixel densities photo files have increased in size. A 16 MP camera would give JPGs of 4 or 5Mb, depending on the compression level. The corresponding RAW files would be about 16Mb.

To cut a long story short, it is easy to gather a photo collection 100-200-or more Gb after a few years of using a modern digital camera. In itself, that is no problem. Modern hard drives can hold a few Tb of information and still be reasonably affordable. But are they reliable? Yes, they are. Do they fail? Not too often but occasionally they do. I had a drive failing within its warranty period and another something like a few months after it expired. Regardless of the cost, getting parted with several thousand photos of mine - little pieces of history, as I called them - wouldn't have been pleasant at all. Those two times I was lucky - I had more-or-less decent backups.

So, there you have the challenge: having a backup strategy (and a data restore plan), which will secure both the files themselves and their associated data (e.g., album structures and anything not within the files themselves) and will gather those files from all the different computing platforms in use (PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc.).

The various cloud services offer a truly tempting backup alternative. Google does it for every photo one takes from an Android device and can do it with PC content as well (I believe - I have never tried the latter). In could storage services Google already has several competitors - Dropbox, OneDrive, Flickr (for photos) and many others.

Having one's data (photos, in this case) in the cloud comes with a great deal of pluses: It is a kind of backup, the backup of that backup is somebody else's problem, it keeps content accessible from anywhere, it makes content sharing simple, it is easy to use, it is affordable or - even - for free. OK, that last bit regarding cost does vary on the data volume needed - 100 Gb won't be available for free.

Is the cloud truly reliable? Hmmm.... Yes it mostly is. Does it every fail? Hmmm.... Yes, it does. Or, at least it may fail providing access to one's data when one needs them. Occasionally cloud services close or change their terms of service, etc. That may or may not be bad thing. It happens, though. Then, there is the question of bandwidth: how much time does one need to recover the data, if needed? Is that any easy process? And finally, there is the question of privacy: what privacy level can one expect with one data if those are stored on the cloud? The answers to these last questions vary depending on the cloud services provider. And on one's confidence on the provider's policy.

Let's face it realistically, however. In a lot of real-life scenarios, cloud storage is highly practical. The cloud offers options and capabilities that local storage can't easily match. At least not within the IT resources range an everyday person can maintain. But this doesn't mean that one shouldn't have a copy of one's dataset in a medium at a hand's reach. After all, when it comes to photos, those are little bits of personal history that we are talking about :)

The "WE" Individuals of the Digital Era

'Bee hive 2' by Botters
under a CC license

Knowledge has always been a valuable thing. A lot of resources are invested in getting it, being studies or just hiring the right people. And there are tools available to transmit it (books, schools, the media, etc.) as well as the means to protect it (intellectual property laws, non-disclosure agreements, information concealing technologies, etc.).

Information technologies have considerably changed the knowledge landscape, though. Information tends to be better distributed or - at least - more accessible. With a bit of exaggeration, one could support that it is getting increasingly easier to become "an expert" on something.

As usual, however, there is a catch. Well, in fact, many catches:

 Reliability; Accuracy;Suitability;Completeness... and that is just to name a few.

The interesting point is that those same catches also apply to several of the traditional means of knowledge dissemination, such as books. The difference, however, is that the perception of reliability, accuracy, etc., of what we find online tends to be favourably biased. I don't know why. Maybe because when we look something up on the internet we want to get somewhere quickly and easily.

The bottom line is that the people of the digital era are no longer isolated knowledge-islands but, rather, autonomous nodes of a network: they have access to "collective knowledge" and, sometimes, contribute to it. Individuals are (digitally) backed up by many others, although the process often happens unconsciously, well hidden in the background.

At any rate, in the modern business world, that brings up to the scene some new facts.

Firstly, the "layman" should now be considered as one with access to a lot of information, possibly unfiltered, possibly biased, possibly incomprehensible to him/ her, maybe even wrong but, at any rate, information.

Secondly, the expectations from an "expert" should now be somewhat different: having some knowledge on his/ her field is just not enough anymore. Experts should be able to go much beyond the layman of today and considerably beyond the well-informed professional that hires him/ her.

I have the feeling that we are now in a transitional period, where the new and old types of common people/ experts co-exist. Understandably, that leads to confusion, especially when our expectations of the others are not matched in reality.

Daniel Gulati, a New York entrepreneur, has gone as far as to advise us: "Beware of the everyday expert" in his article in Harvard Business Review. I understand his concerns. But, on the brighter side of things, today, business people may be able to do much more on their own than what was normally possible a few years ago. That is particularly helpful for entrepreneurs, I guess, although the audience they are addressing has also become more demanding.

To me, the real challenge is how we use this potential to make our lives better, at the professional but also at the personal (societal) level.

P.S. (1) And, just to be fair, a lot of focus has been falling lately on the  knowledge-based economy and the society of knowledge. The niche of this post is really tiny and has to do with everyday people in their everyday lives. In other words, please don't extrapolate to the world economy level :-)

P.S. (2) Just because we have access to information that many others have provided, we are not necessarily less "individual" than we used to. No, we haven't reached the Borg stage, yet. Surely, many people will feel handicapped if google (or bing) goes offline but it's the access to information that will be what they'll be missing, not the people behind it :-)