Today, it is Cloud Computing. “The Cloud” may indeed change computing forever, but no one really understands quite how yet. That doesn’t stop people from writing about it, however. Companies are again clamoring for people who can write about the nebulous technology. Publications want to be regarded as the most authoritative source of cloud news. (One editor told me: “We want to be known as the expert on all-things-cloud.”) And yet few really know what they are talking about. In most cases, it’s more like a Rorschach test, with companies projecting what they hope cloud will do for their business. They spend big on advertising to crow about how their products and services relate to the cloud. And they churn out a never-ending stream of white papers and “thought-leadership” articles to show that they understand what cloud computing is and how it will affect the industry.

It’s whistling past the graveyard. The basic idea of cloud computing – that someone else owns and runs the computer and you just buy the service (like Google Apps) – is scaring most hardware and software companies to their core. After all, what happens to their business model if most individuals and corporations no longer buy computers or applications? Better to talk loudly about how cloud actually creates a need for whatever they are selling.

For freelancers like me, who specialize in technology and business, cloud computing has been a boon. Last year, as companies started recovering from the economic body blow of 2008, they restored marketing departments’ budgets. After a very lean year in 2010, I suddenly had a wealth of assignments all about the cloud. Take any topic that I might otherwise have written a story about a couple of years ago – computer security, for example. Now it is a story about computer security in the cloud. Mainframe computers? How mainframes can be used to create clouds. Storage technology? How to store data in the cloud. At least 50 percent of my work last year was related to cloud. And so it seems to be going this year as well.

We journalists like to complain about the hype in the high tech industry. We sometimes accuse marketers of trying to create FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in order to sell their products. But, at least in this case, the FUD fallout from cloud is selling my product and paying my bills. Let it rain!

We’re in the midst of a national political obsession about creating jobs, but what exactly constitutes employment today? Fewer and fewer U.S. citizens hold a 9-to-5, 40-hour-a-week job with salary, healthcare, 401k plan and paid vacation. Even fewer will in the future, because what people do for a living, and how they do it, is changing.

As a freelancer, I work at home, set my own hours, try to get paid what I’m worth, buy my own health insurance, contribute to an IRA (no matching funds here) and make a reasonably good living. But some people still don’t consider that a real job. Including many freelancers. A colleague of mine, who was laid off from a magazine six months ago and is freelancing while looking for another position, still refers to herself as unemployed. My neighbor, who lost her job as an administrative assistant two years ago, is among the “long-term, chronically unemployed.” Despite her best efforts, she hasn’t been able to find another full-time administrative job. But she seems to stay fairly busy temping.

It’s not just full-time communications and administrative positions that are vanishing. As we buy more and more stuff online, we need fewer salespeople. And at my local grocery store, where I used to chat amiably with a cashier who got good pay and benefits, I now scan and bag my own groceries.

The truth is that much of what we call employment are jobs that were created by and structured for the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, they are no longer necessary. In the span of human history, most people worked for themselves (unless they were wealthy or enslaved), scratching out a living however they could. My grandparents, for example, were all farmers. In 1900, 41 percent of U.S. jobs were agricultural, according to government statistics.

Whatever you want to call it – – the contractor economy or free-agent nation – this new model of work requires individuals to have different skills and requires government to provide different services to support such a workforce. (National healthcare, anyone?) “People who are spending all their time trying to find that full-time job with benefits – some small portion will get them, but for the vast majority, these [freelance projects] are the jobs,” Sara Hororwitz, executive editor of the Freelancers Union, told Crain’s New York Business in an article earlier this year. (Note: Crain’s requires you to register for a free trial subscription.)

Yet our national leaders are looking backward, talking about creating last-century jobs, as if U.S. companies were going to start hiring full-time workers again. Even if the economy improves, corporations have learned that they don’t need employees. They only need contractors. In many cases, it’s going to be up to individuals to create their own jobs. That bodes well for those of us who have the skills and aptitude to become a company of one. For the rest of society, it’s time for the politicians and our government to face the realities of employment in the Digital Age and figure out how to nurture it.

OK, so maybe I’m not much of a data point. After all, my audience of 100 or so family, friends and colleagues would probably still read my blog even if it made no sense and was stuffed with keywords like “Viagra.” In fact, I’m pretty sure a couple of them might even read it more.

The point is that Google has succeeded, at least temporarily, in kicking the content farms down a few notches in search results. That’s a good thing for anyone who cares about good editorial. Demand Media admits that Google’s new algorithm hurt its search rankings. In a conference call to discuss the company’s quarterly results in May, CEO Richard Rosenblatt said search engine referrals for eHow were down 20 percent. The company is also still losing money, reporting a first-quarter loss of $5.6 million. As of May 18, Demand Media’s share price was down to less than $15, from a high of just over $24.

In explaining the changes to its algorithm, Google is trying to encourage higher quality. While it won’t reveal details on the new algorithm, since that would defeat the whole point of confounding the content farms, Google did explain the company’s thinking on its Webmaster Central Blog. It presented a list of questions, most of which any good editor would use to judge the quality of her website, magazine or newspaper. Among them:

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend or recommend?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

“We hope the questions above give some insight into how we try to write algorithms that distinguish higher-quality sites from lower-quality sites,” wrote Amit Singhal, Google Fellow.

In apparent reaction, Demand Media announced that it will hire “feature writers” to write 850-word-plus articles based on actual reporting.

“The feature writer role is designed to bring highly experienced writers into our studio to develop lifestyle features around topical ideas, with compelling story lines and original quotes from known industry experts,” said Jeremy Reed, senior vice president of editorial at Demand Media.

What a novel idea. Almost sounds like journalism.

And what will they pay these writers, who are required to have 5 to 10 years of experience writing or reporting for a major daily newspaper or equivalent experience as a regular contributor to a major magazine? Up to $350 per article. Yes sir, three hundred and fifty big ones.

And how many of those 850-plus words are going to have to be certain keywords? Somehow, I don’t think this move will do much for Demand Media’s search engine ranking. Quality is something that just doesn’t fit into its business model.

Meanwhile, after having watched the explosion of digital publishing over the last year, I’ve increasingly wondered whether I might be able to publish and sell my articles to readers directly.

After attending the Maryland Writers Association (MWA) annual meeting in early April, I’m convinced that at least some journalists could do this and make more money than the typical freelance fee for any given article. The MWA is primarily for fiction writers, and the panel discussions focused on book publishing, but what I heard there only reinforced my belief that an exciting new publishing and distribution model is opening up for writers of all kinds, including journalists.

More and more authors are publishing e-books through companies like Amazon and Smashwords, and making good money doing it. The poster girl for this is the young writer Amanda Hocking, who has made more than a million dollars publishing her short novels on the Kindle. After slowly creeping up on them for years, disintermediation has finally hit the “legacy publishers” (as the participants of one panel at the MWA meeting insisted on calling them) hard.

This entertaining (but very long) discussion of e-book publishing between authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath lays out the reasons behind the self-publishing stampede. You don’t have to read the entire 13,000 words on the business reasons, including an explanation of the revenue math, to be convinced that self-publishing is at least worth a try. These quotes reverberate in my head:

On distribution of stories: “Print is just a delivery system. It gets a story from the writer to the reader. For centuries, publishers controlled this system, because they did the printing, and they were plugged into distribution. But with retailers like Amazon, B&N [Barnes & Noble], and Smashwords, the story can get to the reader in a faster, cheaper way.”

On the worth of writers, aka content producers: “We provide the content that is printed and distributed. For hundreds of years, writers couldn’t reach readers without publishers. We needed them. Now, suddenly, we don’t. But publishers don’t seem to be taking this Very Important Fact into account.”

I heard variations of these themes all over the MWA conference. One panelist predicted that within five years, more than 50 percent of all books will be e-books. How much journalism is already consumed digitally today? Probably well over half. And with the iPad and other tablets starting to breathe visual life into digital newspaper and magazine stories, it should increase astronomically.

Why not package and sell single articles? I’m aware of at least one experiment in selling digital long-form journalism singles: the Atavist. The articles are by well-known journalists, of course, to appeal to the general public and attract as many buyers as possible.

Would this work in trade journalism? One of the literary agents at the MWA meeting, Jessica Sinsheimer of the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency, encouraged authors to aim for niches rather than the mass market. The more narrowly defined the market, she said, the easier it is to sell the story. That’s the whole idea behind trade publishing: niche audiences – CEOs of technology companies, for example – want articles that deal with the issues and events that are most important to them.

Would they pay for that? What if a journalist wrote an article of 5,000 words that brought them new, useful information that could make a real difference in their life, career or company? Going the traditional route, that journalist might expect to make $5,000 to $7,500 for that story. What if she published her own e-story and charged $10 a pop? Based on Konrath’s figures that an author can keep 70 percent of the revenue when publishing on Kindle, she’d have to sell at least 1,000 copies to reach that $7,500. Just as important, however, is the fact that she would retain the rights to that article. Maybe she could later sell it to a couple of “legacy publishers,” or publish it as part of a longer book.

Effective social networking could be the key. If a writer is to have any hope of selling her own stories, she has to have developed a personal readership – people who know her and want to read her stuff. Another publishing agent on the panel, Jason Allen Ashlock of Movable Type Literary Group, stressed how important it is for writers to build and grow their reputation and relationship with readers. Not only does it help promote the writer, but it also feeds the writer good ideas for future stories. By communicating with readers, a writer can learn what her audience wants. And if her stories deliver what her audience wants, she should be able to sell more of them. It becomes a virtuous cycle. When readers are being overwhelmed by the vast universe of digital information, hitting a reader’s sweet spot becomes very valuable. “Where there’s an abundance of content, then quality content becomes your marketing strategy,” said Ashlock. “Business models can be built around good content.”

The next few years will tell whether and to what extent individual journalists will be able to profit more directly from their work. Regardless of what happens, the “freelance” in freelance journalism is starting to take on a whole new meaning.

I launched into my disaster recovery plan. I called my sister. She was out of power, too. Time for Plan B. I spent the morning shoveling out my driveway, then hit the road.

We already live in an electricity-addicted society. But for us home workers, the loss of power directly impacts our livelihood. Not only does the house go cold and the food in the fridge go bad, we can’t work without computer, phone and Internet access. And when we don’t work, we don’t get paid. So as soon as houses go dark, we swarm businesses and public places like bees to blossoms, searching for sweet juice.

My first stop was the neighborhood Starbucks. A hand-scrawled sign on the door told me they had lost their power, too. The next stop was the nearby Panera’s. As I suspected, I had been too slow in shoveling out. Every table was occupied. Every electrical outlet, taken. I stood in line to buy a coffee, hoping that someone might leave in the interim. They did, but I wasn’t quick enough. Juggling my coffee, laptop and bulging paper files, I was like a lumbering elephant amidst a pack of Twitter-deprived teenage cheetahs. No contest.

Stop number three was the public library. Not only does it have lots of chairs and outlets, but the public square around the library has free WiFi. At least I could access the Internet. I pulled into the garage, then slogged over to the building to find a small group of similarly frustrated refugees huddled before the doors. Not only was the library dark, but the entire public square was powerless. I sloshed back to my car, demoralized.

But I forged on. Next stop: Barnes & Noble. It has a Starbucks inside, WiFi and two spacious floors full of chairs, tables and outlets. When I pulled into a full parking lot, I knew I had finally reached a watering hole. Inside, the store was packed. Every chair and table was taken, and around the perimeter on both levels, folks camped greedily on the floor around the outlets. I wandered around, searching for an open plug, when this woman caught my eye and pointed down at the floor next to her. I could hardly believe it. It was an eight-outlet power strip, and she was beckoning me over to use the last available one. Instead of eyeing me warily, this woman was smiling. I plopped down next to her, and plugged in. I felt like hugging this lady. She explained that I needed to thank the teenage girl sitting next to her. It was she who had agreed to unplug her single device (a cellphone, I believe) and allow this woman to plug in the power strip, thus multiplying the electricity for all. She was like Jesus with the loaves and the fishes.

I sat there for a couple of hours, answering e-mail and finishing a story that was due that day. I offered to buy the woman coffee, but she declined. She just seemed to enjoy being helpful.

As I drove home I thanked God for those good Samaritans. And I revised my disaster recovery plan: next time I go foraging for electricity, I will be armed with a power strip.

I pulled into my driveway and noticed a low droning sound coming from the house across the street. I got out of the car. I smelled propane. A generator. Addendum to disaster recovery plan: next time it snows, help others. Offer to shovel your neighbor’s driveway. And bring a very long extension cord.

It also gives me time to evaluate the state of my freelance career. In spite of the economy, I had a fairly good year. I’m especially thankful for:

• My clients, most of whom have maintained my pay rate, even in this bad economy
• Editors who make good copy great
• Editors who think my stories are good enough to enter in the ASBPE awards, one of which I won in November (Thanks, Computerworld editors!)
• Clients and colleagues who refer business to me

But there are several things I want for next year. Here’s my freelance wish list. If there is a Santa, I hope he’s reading this.

• Quality, affordable healthcare. I’ve posted about this before, both here and here. The single most difficult part of being a freelancer is obtaining and paying for health insurance. After a long struggle, I finally got mine through a Maryland state high-risk pool. To keep costs down, I’ve gone with high-deductible ($2,600) plan. The premiums have gone up more than 100 percent in four years. I now pay $300 a month, or $3,600 annually. Meanwhile, my doctor is changing to a “membership practice,” which will require another $1,800 a year on top of that. That’s $8,000 before my health insurance provider even thinks of covering my healthcare costs.

• Reliable electricity. My regional power company, PEPCO, has one of the poorest reliability ratings in the country, and I seem to be on the weakest part of its grid. My power can go out for no apparent reason, even on a sunny, windless day. When bad weather hits, my street is usually the first to lose power and the last to regain it. During last winter’s Snowmaggedon, when the D.C. area got hit by two blizzards in a row for a total accumulation of almost four feet, my power was out for more than three days.

• If I can’t have #2, then a windfall of $10,000 to buy a generator for the house would be nice.

• Continued economic recovery. I’ve seen business pick up this year, and then fall off again, and then pick up again. It’s generally headed in the right direction, but I’m paranoid that another financial catastrophe could pull us all down again.

• Just one more steady gig to even out my sometimes erratic cash flow.

In the spirit of slowing down to enjoy the holidays, I’ll be taking a break from blogging for the next couple of weeks. Happy Holidays. May we all get our wishes in 2011.

That was the happy message at the “Future of Freelancing” conference held last week at Stanford University. Several sessions served to inspire the 120-plus mid-career freelancers in attendance, telling us to stay brave and persistent in pursuing our craft. I was heartened by a panel of assigning editors from Popular Science, The Washington Post, Wired and The New Yorker, as they talked about the wonders of long-form journalism, a “crying need for narrative” and their hunger for new ideas from freelancers.

Everything else, however, is changing fast: the platform on which we publish our stories, the tools we use to tell our stories, and who controls how we tell those stories and to whom. While the changes are daunting at best, for freelancers they can be an opportunity to become the vanguard of a new age of journalism.

It’s news to nobody that publishing platforms are changing. While paper isn’t going away, other platforms have proliferated. The Web is already as popular as paper, for reading short items at least. The e-reader and iPad are becoming increasingly popular as ways to deliver news and magazine stories. Writers need to be on all these platforms, or they’ll miss part of their potential audience.

As these platforms change, they open up new ways to tell our stories. Ways that we should all learn. Although the editors at most sessions wouldn’t go so far as to say they’d pick a freelancer with video and audio skills over one with just writing skills – all other things being equal – it was clear to me that writers without audio and video in their toolbox will limit their opportunities. The most practical and useful session of the conference was given by Richard Koci Hernandez, a Ford Foundation Multimedia Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, who inspired us with his belief that today “is the golden age of storytelling,” excited us with the prospect of “reaching a global audience with one click” and gave us practical advice on how to acquire audio and video skills.

Finally, the old gatekeepers of publishing are losing their grip on the creative product. Remember the term “disintermediation,” which was popular in the 1990s when the Web had just burst onto the scene? It’s gaining speed in publishing. Authors are publishing books themselves rather than going through traditional channels. Why can’t journalists publish their stories directly on the Kindle? Journalist Damon Brown recently published a guide to the iPad on the Kindle, for example. It’s priced at $1.99.

For those journalists with an entrepreneurial bent, in particular, the future could be interesting indeed. This conference was a one-time deal, the project of Christine Larson, a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford. She deserves an award for having the idea and pulling it off. We freelancers – indeed all journalists – need more conferences like this. I hope the immense amount of positive feedback I heard at the conference turns into action by all attendees to make sure we get them.

I’m convinced it does. But it’s going to be so different from what we’re used to that we aren’t even capable of conceiving it yet. A source for one of my stories on digital publishing points out that when the automobile first came out, people called it the horseless carriage. The only way they could define these early cars was by relating them to a familiar mode of transportation. That’s the kind of disconnect we have in the publishing business. The whole world has changed, and we don’t understand the new world well enough yet to see where and how we’ll fit in. And many of us are terrified that we are selling buggy whips.

The terror has been building steadily this year. A couple of months ago, I participated in a lively LinkedIn discussion. The thread was started by a post by freelance colleague Polly Traylor, who lamented the state of the freelance business on her blog. It didn’t take long for many of us to chime in – and the opinions ranged from: it’s a brand new world and “those who learn to adapt and embrace the change may actually find a lot of opportunity in it” to “freelance journalism is dead” and all that’s left to do is “put fresh flowers on its grave.” (You can read the discussion here.)

It’s clear that no one – including the biggest media companies – has a clue. Consider these two news reports from just this week. First, News Corp. announced strategic moves toward its promised strategy of charging readers for online content. It bought Skiff LLC , which makes an e-reader and a digital publishing platform. News Corp. also invested in Journalism Online, a startup by Steven Brill and other media executives that aims to offer a way for publishers to charge readers for online news.

In contrast, Forbes.com is going in the other direction, apparently planning to use thousands of unpaid contributors instead of professional journalists, according to a report by Paul Carr on TechCrunch. At a recent staff meeting Lewis Dvorkin, who oversees Forbes editorial, said that “Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent,” according to Carr. As my colleague Howard Baldwin has pointed out, that comment makes us freelancers feel like we belong in a museum. (Getting old is a theme for Howard. See his blog, “Middle-Age Cranky.”)

Meanwhile, social media consultant Paul Gillin recently passed along this trailer to an upcoming documentary, “Fit to Print,” on the dying news business. While melodramatic, what this clip does not exaggerate is the level of fear among professional journalists.

It’s the end of the journalism world as we know it. The big question is: what’s next? I hope this conference gives me at least some possible answers. Tune in next week to find out.

When I see a doctor, I pay attention to prices. My high-deductible insurance plan means I pay for the first $2,600 of my health costs every year. Often, the healthcare system doesn’t like it when I insist on knowing what things cost. This story is an extreme but telling example.

I went to a specialist for treatment of my herniated discs. The specialist was highly rated by a local magazine, so I expected top-notch care. What I found was a practice that seems designed to minimize contact with the patient while maximizing the amount of insurance money it can extract.

When I made the appointment and asked how much it would cost, the response was: “insurance will cover it.” When I explained that I would be paying for it and asked again for the cost, they claimed they couldn’t give me a price because it would be based on the doctor’s diagnosis after our consultation.

My first appointment was hardly a consultation. In fact, the doctor and his staff barely talked to me. I had been asked to fill out a 10-page questionnaire in preparation for our meeting. When I arrived, I reminded them of my concern over cost, and the receptionist assured me that I’d be presented with the price after the doctor had determined my treatment. I waited 45 minutes to see the doctor, who finally breezed in and spent all of 10 minutes with me. He then explained the procedure he recommended, and something about the way he said it made me think it was the exact same recommendation he would give to the 35 other patients he would see that day. Then he handed me a printout of the other things I should buy to treat the problem: a prescription pain patch, a back brace and a home transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) machine to relax back muscles and reduce pain. I wonder how much of a kickback he is getting from the manufacturers.

Again I asked what all this would cost. Again the standard response: “insurance will cover it.” He brushed me off when I tried to explain why that wasn’t an adequate answer.

No one ever gave me a list of the costs. I went ahead and had the procedure, because I was in pain and desperate (I later found out it cost more than $2,000), but didn’t follow the rest of his recommendations right away. I checked with my pharmacist and the pain patches cost $200. Each. When I went back for what turned out to be a five-minute followup, the nurse practitioner chided me for not following the doctor’s orders. And when I tried to explain to her my concern about cost? You guessed it: “insurance will cover it.” When it was clear I wasn’t buying, she yanked the info sheet on the TENS machine out of my hands and told me I could wait on that, but insisted I get the back brace. It came in the mail the other day. It looks expensive, but I won’t know how much it is costing me until the doctor bills my insurance company, and the insurance company in turn bills me.

My primary care doctor doesn’t even take insurance. I find that liberates both of us to cut through the insurance bullshit. He’s straightforward about costs. His rate is $90 per half hour. Period. He’s not trying to push more tests, procedures or pills on me. In fact, when I needed an MRI for my back, he gave me two different labs to call. He advised me to call both, explain that I was a “self pay,” and then dicker with them on the price. The first lab wouldn’t come down on the $1,100 sticker price. The second one dropped the price to $500.

Why is there such a lack of transparency, not to mention logic, in healthcare prices? Somebody in this system is making a lot of money from the fact that “insurance will cover it,” and those people have an obvious interest in obscuring costs. Until more patients have to pay more directly for their healthcare, which will in turn force all the players to be more accountable, I doubt that the system will change.

I was so surprised that I blurted out: “Not only is that not in my ballpark, it’s not even in my state!”

Needless to say, she never called again.

I’ve learned to broach the subject of fees a lot earlier in discussions with potential clients, to avoid wasting my time and theirs. This has become even more important with the proliferation of websites that pay would-be writers nil or pennies per hit just to blather on about a given topic. This has given some inexperienced publishers the impression that writers are, quite literally, a dime a dozen. Would-be, novice writers are. Professional journalists are not.

Freelance pay rates have always been a tricky equation for both editor and writer. I know because I’ve spent more than half of my career as an editor. I know how hard it is to find and hire good, reliable writers but stay within a limited (and these days continually shrinking) budget. I also know how valuable a good freelancer can be.

Most editors need freelancers who can do more than just write well, although that’s the first prerequisite. Writers must be able to follow specific directions. They also need to be able to do the opposite: work with vague, general assignments from editors who either don’t know what they want or are not very good at communicating it. Freelancers need the background and experience to know how to report a story and to be able to shift gears (in consultation with the editor, of course) if the information doesn’t fit with the original notion (if there was one). Finally, freelance writers must be able to meet deadlines, take criticism (constructive or not) and be willing to revise a story if it doesn’t hit the mark.

Editors that try to get by with paying the lowest fees won’t get all, or any, of the above. They will typically spend so much time trying to manage the writer and then editing, revising and even rewriting the article that it costs them twice what it would have if they paid a good writer a fair wage. Most editors, including myself, know this. And that’s why good writers, including myself, will want to know upfront if the assignment is going to pay enough to be worth their time.