Steve Rosenbaum recently wrote an article about the messy state of the internet and the need for a “curated cloud.” Rosenbaum writes, “There’s good news in Apple’s iCloud announcement at WWDC, but it may not be from Apple. Let me explain. For the past five years we’ve been roaring headlong toward a digital disaster. A conflict that puts form factors, data creation, and consumer behavior in a trajectory that could only be catastrophic.”

Rosenbaum continues, “Simply put — we broke the web. Meanwhile, Apple has been on a mission to replace hardware with software. Jobs is building a business that sells bits rather than disks or shrink wrap software. In fact, not only do they want to sell bits — but really what they want to do is sell other people’s bits, and charge a hefty 30% commission for building an efficient marketplace. Along the way Apple figured out that individuals didn’t want to ‘sync’ data — as the frustratingly kludgy Mobile Me tried to do unsuccessfully, but rather access data — multiple devices from a single source. That’s where the cloud comes in.”

He goes on, “Here’s the problem. The real opportunity of the cloud is about sharing, not controlling content. Sticking your files on a shared server is great, as far as it goes, but it’s not a computing revolution — it’s just a secure storage solution. The opportunity — the game changer — is the Curated Cloud. The place where you can store, and selectively share what you know and what you wish to share. It was the promise of the Semantic Web. Back when Tim Berners-Lee coined the phrase 1998, he expressed his vision of the web with the powerful phrase: ‘I Have a Dream.’”

Read the full article here.

Image: Courtesy Apple