A year ago the term “cloud computing” wasn’t even on the radar. Now it’s everywhere. Microsoft is doing it, Amazon is doing it, IBM is doing it, Google is doing it, Sun is doing it, Apple is doing it, HP is doing it, everyone is doing it.

We thought this would be interesting in relation to the decreasing search trend for “web hosting” that we spoke about in our previous post.

Take a look at this search volume graph for the term “cloud computing” from Google Trends. Interest is soaring.

So we know that “the cloud” is very in right now. But what exactly is cloud computing? The term is currently a bit fuzzy around the edges (just like a cloud, one could say… ).

The Rightscale blog has a pretty good summary of the situation, partially quoted below (emphasis added by us):

It looks like pretty soon all computing will be called cloud computing, just because the cloud is “in.” Fortunately most computer savvy folks actually have a pretty good idea of what the term ‘cloud computing’ means: outsourced, pay-as-you-go, on-demand, somewhere in the internet, etc.

That post has a good breakdown of the different aspects of the cloud computing concept that you may want to have a look at if you’re interested.

Buzz and hype aside, we really like this trend. Once developers are able to host their applications without being too bothered about the underlying infrastructure or scaling issues (though of course, scaling always becomes an issue at some point), this should produce a boost in services offered on the web. This is going in the right direction as far as we are concerned.

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending approval of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We also talked about Nokia’s recent financial results, if Google Chrome can hit more than 50% market share this year, and the recent privacy-blunder by the guys behind the Path mobile app.

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There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.

So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.

Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.

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Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!

For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.

Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.

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Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

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In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

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