Today I get to give a talk about a topic that I am very excited about: cloud computing. As I scanned the program at Web 2.0 Expo I found that there are 10 presentations with ‘cloud’ in the title and I suspect that many more will mention it. While it has become a buzzword and may therefore suffer the fate of other buzzwords, I am convinced that the basic ideas behind it are sound and will have profound impact on everything we do (I already had a series of posts on that but will sure revisit often). In my talk today I am going to set out 4 principles that together I believe define cloud computing. I will post these here over the next few days.