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Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, says "the cloud" is a phenomenon that is bigger than the advent of the PC. I think he's almost got it right. Cloud is bigger than the PC Revolution, but it's big in part because it incorporates and extends the PC revolution to Internet server clusters. The cloud owes more to the PC than Eric acknowledges.

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You've got a cough and a fever--and haven't had your flu shot yet. Could you possibly have H1N1? Microsoft has launched a new website to help you assess whether you've got swine flu.

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IBM is wading into online email service, a space where Google, Yahoo and Microsoft already have big presences. Is IBM staging a kamikaze run, giving itself one more place where Lotus Notes will show it's got difficulty competing? Is there a method to this madness? Why does IBM have its head in the clouds?

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If you suspect your extra-cranky baby has an ear infection on a Saturday afternoon, but his doctor isn't back in the office till Monday, a walk-in clinic--like the kind springing up in places such as retail pharmacy chains--can be a convenient place to get the ear checked. But if it's the middle of the night, what do you do?

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Open enrollment season starts soon and unfortunately for many organizations, that'll mean informing employees that they've got higher healthcare co-pays and deductibles starting in January. But for some employers, this year's open enrollment season brings some innovative twists to their benefits offerings, thanks to the web.

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One could say that when it comes to IT and healthcare, President Obama is taking some of his own medicine. Obama isn't only pushing healthcare providers to adopt IT; Obama is skillfully using technology to promote his healthcare reform plans.

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There are a few ways to see Microsoft's plans for a free web-based version of Office. One, it's self-competition; two, it's competition with open source software; three, it's competition with other web services. Which one matters most?

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It's finally happened. Google's dived headfirst into the desktop operating system game, just like people speculated they would. And from the sound of it, it's an OS where the main user-interface metaphor is the web. Pass the aspirin.

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After installing 64-bit Windows on one of my test machines, I scurried around to see what 64-bit desktop applications are available in the open source world. Firefox is one of them, but not officially -- at least, not yet. The reasons for this are not what you might think.

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Firefox 3.5 went to public release-candidate status earlier this week. But while the whole 3.5 branch was still under wraps, I was sticking my neck out and running the bleeding-edge nightly builds of the browser -- and was surprised at how un-beta it was.

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Mozilla's Prism entered public beta testing on Friday, a milestone marking the software's readiness for general use and the convergence of local computing with the cloud.

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Probably not. But ROI is only one way to measure value. Here's an informal business case from EMC on the benefits.

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The satellite imagery in Google Earth and Google Maps is the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, which is to say that it's not protected by the First Amendment right to free speech.

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Web application security is of particular importance because so much of our digital life is spent interacting with Web applications. Lori MacVittie, technical marketing manager with F5 and former Network Computing senior technology editor, has spent years kicking the question of where application security belongs -- in the network or the application -- back and forth. But I want to draw a line in the sand: Don't depend on Web application firewalls to fix your software problems.

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Google searches provide insight into the spread of the flu, so it's perhaps no surprise that they also reveal something about our ailing economy.

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The OSGi Alliance just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Another vendor consortium congratulating itself? Not exactly. OSGi has done a lot to make Java less of a mountain to climb. It specifies simpler, independent modules of code that can be modified, even when the application is running. And therein lies new opportunity.

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As with most things, persistence pays off on Twitter. Just post regularly, a few times a day. Follow people. Engage in discussion. Respond to what other people say. Post whatever interests you if you think it interests other people. Sometimes post what interests you even if you don't think anyone else will find it interesting. Experiment.

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Semantic search is like porn: I'm pretty sure I'll know it when I see it. So when semantic search upstart Truevert came by for a visit, I got all googly (I think I might have even screamed "yahoo"). The Truevert system, powered by OrcaTec's discovery toolkit, is narrowly defined around green, but it's definitely an eye-opening, fresh approach to an elusive problem.

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The trust in digital certificates relies on the fact that the authority issuing the certificate has validated the identity of the person or company making the request and that the digital certificate can't be forged. New research presented at the 25th Chaos Computer Congress shows that forging digital certificates is possible and practical. Trust in the SSL is now broken.

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In an unusual move, Microsoft has issued a patch for all versions of Internet Explorer from v5.5 onward and for all versions of the Windows operating system. Time to roll out that out-of-band patch before your users get infected. Reports of users being exploited are rising.

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Google Chrome officially got ratcheted up to a 1.0 release earlier today. The feature set may be meager compared with Firefox (e.g.: no plug-ins, yet), but it's only a starting point. And not just for something to be decked out with plug-ins, either.

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Perception does NOT equal reality. Many technologies simply can't live up to their hype, while others languish in unwarranted obscurity. bMighty.com pumps up the hidden gems and takes the blowhards down a peg.

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Sun's Executive VP for Software, Rich Green, has resigned, just as Sun says it will lay off 15-18% of its employees. This is an awkward juxtaposition. Sun is reorganizing its software unit; open source software is at the heart of its business strategy; and the leading spokesman for open source is going away.

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Last week, I published Part I and Part II of my recent interview with Rajen Sheth, aka the inventor of Google Apps. Throughout Part II, Sheth and I discussed the degree to which the pre-release version of Google's open source browser Chrome represented the sort of browser-side innovations that might take Web-based applications (such as those that are found in Google Apps) to the next level. Google can and does of course push modern day browsers to their limit with the coding it does on the server-side. But there's only so much that can be done on the server-side to take Web applications to the next level before the browser must reciprocate.

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Earlier this week, I published Part I of my recent interview with Rajen Sheth, who is known in the halls of Google as the inventor of Google Apps. Just the name Google Apps causes a bit of confusion. Many users of Google's browser-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentations solutions think they are using Google Apps. Indeed, they are using Google's browser-based applications. But Google Apps is more than just a colloquial reference to Google's portfolio of browser-based applications.

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made a splash with his announcements of ties to Facebook and Amazon's computing cloud at his company's Dreamforce user group meeting this week. "None of these announcements will produce discrete revenue," points out Steven Ashley, the Robert W. Baird investment bank analyst who shared my table at lunch. Then again, they don't necessarily need to.

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With balloons floating as tethered "clouds" in front of the Moscone Center and clouds projected onto the beams of the keynote hall, attendees at Dreamforce in San Francisco probably got the picture that CEO Marc Benioff wanted to talk about cloud computing. Which he did yesterday for two-and-a-quarter hours straight.

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Gunter Ollmann, director of security strategy with IBM Internet Security Systems, wrote a short paper on designing applications to be resistant to infected hosts. Ollmann offers some solid, high-level design advice that Web developers should read and consider adopting. But the paper also highlights the difficulty and complexity in securing the Web-based ecosystem.

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I've been playing around with a new FriendFeed feature that lets you copy all your FriendFeed posts to your Twitter account. I think I like it so far, although it's also possible that it will result in the complete destruction of the space/time continuum. Or, even worse, overwhelming Twitter with a lot of noise.

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Google on Wednesday released a new version of its Chrome browser, the third Chrome beta release.

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I was impressed with my first-ever visit to a Web-based trade show, the InformationWeek 500 Virtual Event, last week. It was powerful and involving. But it also demonstrated how we're still in the very early days of live virtual events, with a long road ahead.

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I'm reluctant to declare that real-time events are the Next Big Thing on the Internet, because it seems like a Next Big Thing comes along on the Internet about once a month, and they're mostly forgotten the next day. Still, I've seen firsthand how powerful virtual events can be. They're an emerging trend. And InformationWeek is in the middle of it all.

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I was hoping to see some real bloodshed at the Web 2.0 Expo panel with representatives from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google. But sadly, everybody was cordial and informative. The one time sparks flew was when a developer in the audience complained about how much work it is to write apps for multiple browsers, and challenged the vendors to fix that.

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Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and other sites that we don't think of as games nonetheless use the principles of gaming to keep their audience engaged, said online game developer Charles Forman at a presentation at Web 2.0 Expo. Other site publishers can use gaming techniques to keep their audiences involved and loyal, said Forman, who is founder and CEO of the social gaming site Iminlikewithyou.

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I'm late to the party for Web 2.0 Expo -- I spent the early part of the week at the InformationWeek 500 Conference, and now that I'm here in New York I'm eager to catch up with my Web 2.0 peers. I've found previous Web 2.0 events in this series made fundamental changes in the way I look at Web publishing, so I'm curious to see whether this event will be equally mind-blowing.

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CrowdSpring is a company that allows businesses to use crowds of graphic designers to create logos, images for ads, and other artwork. They boast about how they used their own process to design their own logo, eventually awarding the project to a janitor who taught himself graphic design. It's a compelling story -- but it's not the whole story.

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Yesterday, I wrote about the war -- more like the Armageddon -- that's on the verge of eruption in the mobile space. Given how critical third-party software developers are to the strategic success of any platform ecosystem, we can fully expect Apple, Google, RIM, Sun (with Java), the Symbian Foundation, Adobe, and others to fight tooth and nail for every mobile developer on the planet. More than one will succeed. But not all. Or, might it not matter? The answer could very much depend on how exactly Google plays its cards with Android, Chrome, and Gears. Consider this.

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CrowdSpring the first vendor I've ever interviewed that made me afraid. As we talked about their business model, I found myself thinking: Are these guys going to put me out of a job?

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According to Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMOFall 08 conference, we've already moved past Web 2.0. We're wrapping up the third generation of the Web. And we're moving on to the fourth. That's when social networking and Web 2.0 (which is actually Web 3.0, she says -- confused yet?) gets to work.

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If you want to take a closer look at Google's Chrome browser, check out my video tour of the software. I'll take you around the user interface, features such as application windows and incognito mode -- aka "porn mode" -- and more.

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That's the error message I get when attempting to launch an additional Chrome window from a Chrome shortcut (like the one its installation routine puts in Windows' Quick Launch Bar). How do you reproduce it and what's the workaround? Read on. But remember folks: it's "beta."

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I just found a solution to a problem that was driving me crazy for months, and I'm passing it along now for my fellow sufferers. Firefox was blocking popups in Google Reader, even though I explicitly told Reader to allow popups for the entire domain Google.com. Turns out this isn't a bug (as the programmer joke goes), it's a feature. Read on for the fix.

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Google Mobile App boosts the already powerful partnership of Google and the iPhone, making searches even faster and more efficient. The app searches Google of course, and it uses your iPhone's built-in location awareness to perform local searches. It also searches your contacts. You can do these things from your iPhone without Google Mobile, but the app provides a slicker and more streamlined interface.

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The location-based social networking service Loopt is trying to recover from a privacy fumble, as users accuse it of spewing text-message spam and disclosing user cell phone numbers and whereabouts without permission. The controversy is sure to be a forerunner of privacy battles to come, as GPS-enabled cell phones like the iPhone enable businesses to track -- and disclose -- where people are at any given moment.

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Microsoft's Office suite of productivity applications has long been the gold standard for everyday computer programs -- and they've been priced that way, too. Sure, some users need that kind of power, but for thems that don't, bMighty.com's latest slideshow lays out eight cheap -- or even free! -- alternatives.

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Firefox 3 has only been out the door for a couple of weeks, but Mozilla.org, which develops the browser, is already looking ahead to the next versions. I talked with Mozilla.org about what users can expect in future 'foxes, and when we can expect them. Bad news for you haters of the smart location bar: It's not going away, Mozilla is committed to it, although they're thinking of ways to modify it to make it more palatable.

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Firefox 3 includes built-in warnings designed to protect you against those bad guys who want to trick you into giving up your credit card numbers, or download software infections to your PC. The browser throws up a warning when you try to visit a known crooked Web page. Take a look at how it works.

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We're kicking off a series of videos showing off the top features of Firefox 3. This time, we're taking a peek at the AwesomeBar, an updated version of the good old browser location bar, designed to make it easier for you to return to your favorite Web pages again and again. The Awesome Bar is controversial -- many people love it (including me). But others hate it, and for those people, we've got tips for how to disable the AwesomeBar.

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A new report forecasting the top 10 workplace trends of the future says video and Web conferencing will make business travel extinct while social networking sites and other Web 2.0 technologies emerge as the primary tools for job recruiting. Is your organization ready to support these and other workplace trends? Or maybe you're already making these shifts.

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In Raiders of the Lost Ark, a character asks Indiana Jones what the plan is. "I don't know. I'm making this up as I go," Indy replies. Loosely paraphrased, that's how Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey answered when I asked him what the company's business plan is.

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