I consider myself a gmail power user and recently chose to upgrade my account with a $20 / year payment for 10 gigs of additional storage.  I route a number of accounts to my primary gmail account and use it throughougt the day, almost every day.  So it was a no-brainer to pour some money into more cloud storage.  However, it is worth noting: paid or unpaid my account went down like the rest.

Since it is 1:30am, I’m not really upset about the outage–but article linked above does point out the important idea of forwarding copies of all mail you receive from gmail to a second, different cloud storage provider.

I shudder at the idea of using Yahoo or Hotmail even as a backup.  Simply seeing these domains in people’s primary email addresses gathers up some initial judgment about the person’s basic computer saviness.

Email is like electric power.  You expect it to be cheap and ubiquotous.  For the rare times that there is a brownout in your neighborhood, it does make sense to look at having a full backup of mail destined for your gmail on a different service provider.

I just checked and gmail is working again for me.  Back to it.  I’ll spend some more time thinking about a backup cloud for my gmails.

Since I rarely see advertisements, I hardly ever investigate contextual advertising.  But given the sheer variety of products and services, I had to check out some of these:

• The Gold Cockerel Books company offers a chicken coop construction booklet at a mere $13.00.  Except they call it a “poultry house” which is surely a major step up for any fowl who grew up in a lowly coop.
• Google picked up on a keyword for a traditional Ethiopian clothing worn around Christmas but instead provided a few links for Chinese clothing.  That’s a pretty far off from Africa, but the wedding dresses were still beautiful.
• Perhaps the most confusing advertisement was the How to be a Manhattan Dad, which linked out to a blog by a father with two young children The City.  There are some rather cute videos of his children endorsing Barack Obama and a brief rant on paternity leave disparity.

I often get stuck in a cycle of reading my big news sites, my rss syndication and checking the analytics on online properties I control.  For those Gmail users seeking adventure, I recommend cruising some of your more colorful past conversations for odd destinations on the web you would otherwise never have considered.