Last month I wrote this paragraph as a part of a longer post on my ideal to reclaim some “ownership” over my digital output and reclaim the role of a curator rather than just producer:

Sam Harrelson – Bringing It All Back Home: “I love the social web and the incredible apps that have come along these last five years. However, I also love my independence. There’s something to the ‘Coral Reef’ idea that Dave Winer spoke of in regards to Twitter a couple of years back that appeals to me in terms of net identity. I like to think of samharrelson.com as my digital coral reef that provides the biosphere and anchor for all the species of web apps that make up my online content ecosystem. That’s the hope here.”

A month later, that sentiment still holds true for me.

However, I’ve run into a particular problem that I wanted to document here so that I can see how I move ahead.

Begrudgingly, I admit that Google owns most, if not all of my data. I’ve been a user of Writely/Google Docs since Fall ’05, a GMail user since the service launched back in April ’04, a Calendar user since that service launched (even though I was pulling for 30Boxes) and a longtime Google Reader user. On top of that, my phone number is also tied to a Google Voice account (and I absolutely love the service).

That’s all great except my Google Voice number that my students, friends, family etc have and a good deal of the data I’d like to keep in one spot is tied to my @gmail.com account instead of my @samharrelson.com account.

So, the question is whether to forward everything over to the @samharrelson.com Google Apps account (which I’d like to do) and deal with the ant-hills as they pop up or try to piece the two accounts together with Dr. Frankenstein’s duct tape?

Of course, I just bought a new MacBook Pro 13 inch and I absolutely love this machine. It’s the perfect combo of performance and size for my needs and makes me wonder how I used my beloved 15 inch Pro for so long (since Nov ’07). As always when I start building my data store on a new Mac, I go through the temptation of using desktop apps such as Mail or NetNewsWire instead of cloud apps from Google.

Then I realize (for the 1,000th time) that the future is in the cloud and just the way things are (hence the picture above for my fellow film fans).