I am Kyle's self-indulgence

I've been letting Google pretty much run my life for some time now. Gmail contains all of my correspondences and personal contacts; Google Reader tracks all of the blogs and websites I read; Google Calendar keeps track of all my appointments for me; I even use iGoogle to bookmark all the important websites I need. Google owns me.

But for the last year I've become even more reliant on their services via Google Docs, a free online word processor. I started using it for work because it was easier than transferring files from home to work and vice versa with a flash drive. I was always dealing with multiple copies of documents on two computers and I could never remember which one was more recently updated. With Google Docs I discovered I could start writing an assignment at school, save it online, then go home and open it immediately on my personal computer, knowing that any revisions I then will show up when I access it from school the next day.

Since then I've uploaded all of the files on my school computer to Google Docs, and I'm in the process of uploading all of my home documents dating back to things I wrote in high school. It feels good to have everything I need in a single program that I can access from any computer at any time. I love that I can tag a document in multiple folders, further eliminating the need for duplicate copies. Then there's the search feature that makes all of Google's services special: I can search for a document I created five years ago, even if I don't remember the name of it, just by searching for a few keywords that I remember about it. This is especially helpful as my document account is approaching 1000.

As services like this are increasingly moving to web-based programs I'm getting to a point where a computer's actual disk storage is irrelevant: everything I do for school, including planning, creating assignments, grading, and writing IEPs, I do in a web browser. My home computer I use to store my media: music, movies, and the like, and I wouldn't be surprised if someday even these, like all information, are stored online and accessed remotely.