Naturally it needs a better name, but it's all I can think of right now. I do like "peer" because it's been made into a dirty word by poor oppressed big business moguls, who cry themselves to sleep at night because so many of us do what we want without their consent. A lot of you are probably already doing some kind of Peer Clouding. It's no big deal, it's just trading services with friends. For example, back in the olden days when I ran my own DNS server I had a couple of far-flung friends acting as my secondaries, as I did for them. It didn't cost anything but a bit of disk space and bandwidth.

We also had arrangements for acting as off-site backup repositories. rsync plus disk encryption ensures end-to-end privacy, and fast mirroring. As long as you have adequate storage and bandwidth, this works for anything-- mirroring Web and FTP sites, source code repositories, valuable collections of kitten photos, anything you can think of.

Everything in life doesn't need to be a big elaborate commercial deal. There is still plenty of room for the small-time do-it-yourselfer. My wireless access point is set up with an open bandwidth-limited subnet just so neighbors or tourists or whoever is in range can have Internet access without a big hassle. (And without snooping privileges in my stuff.) This is a rural area, so we don't have Internet cafes and free public wi-fi everywhere.

I had an IMAP mail account once upon a time that lived on server that was literally in a friend's bedroom on an ISDN Internet connection. He hosted a whole herd of friends. It was a little slow sometimes, but it always worked.

Perhaps I'm stretching the definition of "cloud" a bit, but that's OK because I'm sick of hearing it. But I do think the idea of informal hosting and sharing is a good one; it's under the radar of Big Brother, and of course with Linux it's secure, reliable, and not that hard to do.