Here’s a video of Danny O’Brien convincing you not to put your data in cloud computing services, like 3rd party email, web document editors, photo hosting sites, social networking sites, and the like. He argues a) why would you give your own data, including your most personal data, to an anonymous corporate mediator to store in any case and b) we can probably get the same always-on effortless sharing and still store our data on our own boxes through the magic of technology. The video is terrible. But the idea seems awfully good.

And here’s a guy who makes heavy use of Google’s online services, such as Picasa and Google Docs and Gmail, who has been suddenly, silently and inexplicably shut out of the Google cloud.

I’ve decided to start spelling Google with a capital G again, to remind myself that Google and Google services are not randomly beneficent forces of nature. Google is a company, and it lives a corporate life. Is that (or Yahoo, or Facebook or whomever) the cloud where you want to keep all your stuff?