For example you can run a personal river of news. That's what I do on one of my EC2 instances. Not only for myself but for a few friends at universities and publications. I'm now working on one for a friend who teaches at Harvard. And there's a biologist at Columbia who's using Radio2 to keep a linkblog running. This stuff really works, and is not so hard to set up. And once it's set up, it pretty much runs itself. Running a server may sound hard. But in practice it's as easy as running a laptop. In some ways it's even easier. And Amazon and Microsoft just made it possible to run an EC2 server for a year for free! That's a pretty big deal if you were thinking it might be too expensive just to play around. 1. EC2 for Poets. 2. River2. Just to be sure everything is working, I set up a River2 installation on a micro EC2 instance, and it really went smoothly. |