Update: PlanetCloud was retired after several years when news sources caught up with cloud coverage.

As you are no doubt well aware there is a large and increasing amount of noise about cloud computing, so much so that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to extract a clean signal. This has always been the case but now that even vendors like Oracle (who have previously been sharply critical of cloud computing, in part for exactly this reason) are clambering aboard the bandwagon, it’s nearly impossible to tell who’s worth listening to and who’s just trying to sell you yesterday’s technology under today’s label.

It is with this in mind that I am happy to announce Planet Cloud, a news aggregator for cloud computing articles that is particularly fussy about its sources. In particular, unless you talk all cloud, all the time (which is rare – even I take a break every once in a while) then your posts won’t be included unless you can provide a cloud-specific feed. Fortunately most blogging software supports this capability and many of the feeds included at launch take advantage of it. You can access Planet Cloud at:

http://www.planetcloud.org/ or @planetcloud

Those of you aware of my disdain for SYS-CON’s antics might be surprised that we’ve opted to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, but you’ll also notice that we don’t run ads (nor do we have any plans to – except for a few that come to us via feeds and are thus paid to authors). As such this is a non-profit service to the cloud computing community intended filter out much of the noise in the same way that the Clouderati provides an fast track to the heart of the cloud computing discussion on Twitter. An unwanted side effect of this approach is that it is not possible for us to offer the feeds under a Creative Commons license, as would usually be the case for content we own.

Many thanks to Tim Freeman (@timfaas) for his contribution not only of the planetcloud.org domain itself, but also of a comprehensive initial list of feeds (including many I never would have thought of myself). Thanks also to Rackspace Cloud who provide our hosting and who have done a great job of keeping the site alive during the testing period over the last few weeks. Thanks to the Planet aggregator which is simple but effective Python software for collating many feeds. And finally thanks to the various authors who have [been] volunteered for this project – hopefully we’ll be able to drive some extra traffic your way (of course if you’re not into it then that’s fine too – we’ll just remove you from the config file and you’ll vanish within 5 minutes).