Mist Computing?
The metaphor of "the cloud" is a seductive one, but it's also dangerous. It not only suggests that our new utility-computing system is detached from the physical (and political) realities of our planet, but it also lends to that system an empyrean glow. The metaphor sustains and extends the old idealistic belief in "cyberspace" as a separate, more perfect realm in which the boundaries and constraints of the real world are erased.
Bill Thompson raises a warning flag:
Behind all the rhetoric and promotional guff the "cloud" is no such thing: every piece of data is stored on a physical hard drive or in solid state memory, every instruction is processed by a physical computer and every network interaction connects two locations in the real world … In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle's story.
Now there's a metaphor. I'm guessing, though, that the marketers aren't going to allow "miasma computing" into our vocabulary. It's kind of a downer.
Whilst Miasma Computing has a certain high tech marketing-friendly feel to it, I agree that it is unlikely to stick. Cloud computing has an innocence about it that as suggested could lull people into a false sense of security. Given the opaqueness of what is processed where, plus the dark figures that loom in the shadows (school-centric cyber bullies through to money siphoning crackers), I suggest Mist computing.
