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“Google Earth is still a relatively new technology. As more people learn to use it, I think they’ll find more use out of it.”

That’s the clip. I’m not even sure it was a complete thought but it was the part of the ten minutes of video the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) taped in our boardroom ten days ago used on the National news program “The National” last Wednesday evening.

The topic was Nanaimo British Columbia’s use of Google Earth in making virtually every piece of civic data available to its citizens and the world. You can learn more about this initiative by watching the clip, listening to the discussion during the Webcology show I co-host on WebmasterRadio.fm, or reading the post I wrote in this blog the day the CBC came to visit.

So when the CBC called, I obviously got all excited. It felt like being on the cover of the Rolling Stone so I naturally called my mother and told her to watch the newscast that night. I was having a party at my place that night and we all stopped to watch the newscast. Nothing. There was a segment on the Canadian songwriter Dan Hill, (including one of those melodies that NEVER leaves one’s head after hearing it, arg) but nothing about Google Earth, Metamend or the city of Nanaimo. I was obviously terribly disappointed.

Yahoo appears to be looking to the cloud for its future. As covered by Search Engine Watch, editor Kevin Heisler today, Yahoo is using the 4th largest super-computer in the world, (owned by Mumbai based Computational Research Laboratories) to facilitate research in cloud computing.

Cloud Computing is a term that refers to software packages housed and run from a remote server. Another term for the concept is “server-side software”. Google Docs is likely the most prominent example of cloud computing in action.

While Yahoo’s announcement only covers “research”, the move is very important as Yahoo positions itself to either fend off the Microsoft bid or raise its own value in the face of the bid. Yahoo is developing yet another thing Microsoft needs for its survival.

I am writing and thinking about cloud computing this morning because of a few experiences I had at search engine strategies in New York last week. I spent a lot of time speaking with some of the folks from Microsoft and Google and hanging out with mobile search expert Cindy Krum. There was one conversation between Cindy, myself and Enquisite President Richard Zwicky that particularly stands out in my mind about the future of personal computing and the future of search.