(first published on Technorati on 10/15/2011)¹

CLOUD is today’s word of the interwebs.

First, we’ve got cloud hosting for commercial-based websites and websites representing businesses. Next, we’ve got cloud storage and cloud players, such as the Amazon Cloud Player, where you can upload your most treasured files from your hard drive to the cloud, where you can access them anywhere and re-download them when your computer crashes. We now also have cloud note-taking services, such as the popular Evernote, where you can store all your most important notes as well as access them anywhere when you don’t have your laptop or access directly to your hard drive.

Today, for all the avid writers from all around the world from fiction writers, non-ficiton writers, to contemporary blogging, technology has served us once again, taking advantage of the internet as a means of discovering inspirations as well as getting discovered by publishers and online magazines all around.

We’ve got the awesome Technorati, which gives bloggers all around a chance to write and contribute their articles for the world’s largest blogging search engine.

We also got the yearly NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) that gives creative writers (and in some cases, bloggers) the chance to write and overcome the challenge of writing a 50,000 word count novel with no restrictions or boundaries. And of course, there are various writing communities all around from Fanfiction.net, FictionPress.net, to newer communities such as Wattpad, Scribophile and Protagonize, that are giving various options for writers to expand and improve their craft to a wider audience.

On top of that, we have Amazon‘s Createspace and Barnes & Noble‘s PubIt!, where writers have a chance to sell their creative writing through various tools, mainly publishing eBook versions of your writing.

The disadvantage though with the services I mentioned above was that you are required to save all your work in your hard drive, as those services are all database-powered. Events such as NaNoWriMo do not even save your 50,000+ word count novel in their servers as you only require to copy and paste your work to their word counter to be sure that you have reached your goal before the end of the month. Others have the vulnerability of having several technical problems from server crashes to even getting hacked. Not just that, you as a writer would also gaining technical problems from having your hard drive fried to even occasional screen freezes. And when that happens, you lose all your hard work, especially if you’re one of those users who do not frequently save your work from time to time.

This year, a brand-new service for writers just recently launched back in mid-summer as a brand-new writing tool for writers who will be participating this year’s upcoming NaNoWriMo called Yarny.

What sets this particular service from the other existing services around the web is that this particular service is a very simple writing tool that helps writers organize not just what they write, but to also take sidenotes and other research notes crucial to writing their pieces.

Best of all, Yarny uses the magical power of the cloud to power up their tool and of course, to save everything you have jotted down on the writing pad. In addition to that, like note-taking software and services such as Evernote and and the MS Office-bundled OneNote, the tool saves your work automatically without requiring you to press the Save button frequently.

In fact, you won’t find any Save button anywhere on the Yarny writing tool. The tool is so simple and so efficient that it helps the writer focus directly towards writing alone. Yarny records everything that you jot down and what the tool saves instantly, such as the version number, the date and time that you wrote your new material and the time the tool automatically saves it.

It also has an automatic word counter, which is also very helpful for writers who will be participating in NaNoWriMo this November. It also has a keyword tagging system with the same functions as the ones on blogging platforms such as WordPress for easier search of all your documents, snippets and notes through your account. It also has an export snippets function where you have the alternative to download all your written work to your hard drive if you still prefer working on your writing on another software, such as MS Word. All you have to do to get started is to sign up a free account and you’re ready to go.

I started using Yarny not too long ago to record down my introductory and supplementary research notes including character descriptions for my upcoming novel to be written during NaNoWriMo (which is every November of every year) and with its simple organization system, I was able to get everything organized easily without taking advantage of my personal OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) to get things organized manually.

I also plan on writing my entire 50,000+ word count novel using Yarny by the time November arrives. Though still in beta mode, I’m already loving this cloud service. Maybe later in the future when new features are released that there would also be a spelling and grammar check, just like word processing software, note-taking software and even blogging systems. I now admit that I have become a writer of the cloud, thanks to this new piece of service.

Frustrated with your current writing system with your computer freezing and your software crashing on you from out of the blue? Become a writer of the cloud and take advantage of Yarny. In the near future, there will be more cloud-based writing tools similar to Yarny that will definitely convert any computer-savvy writers in to becoming relieved writers of the cloud. I’m already guaranteed that I would never go back to using my current word processor to write my stories or even my other documents, such as my future Technorati articles. My current laptop is still stable but soon it will malfunction due to its rather old age.

Writers of the cloud, come forth!

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