The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act calls for an unprecedented level of spending on a variety of programs, projects, and initiatives across the country. Ensuring the timely delivery of funds to those in need while limiting fraud, waste, and abuse presents both a challenge to those managing the effort, and opportunity to increase the transparency of government spending.

To illustrate some of the ways recovery spending can be visualized, we leveraged data from StimulusWatch.org to create a series of geospatial mashups using Microsoft's Virtual Earth.

"I have no idea what anyone is talking about," – Larry Ellison, CEO Oracle Corp. talking about cloud computing, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal's article The Internet Industry Is on a Cloud -- Whatever That May Mean

Mr. Ellison is not alone. It's quite possible that if you ask 10 experts what they think cloud computing is you may get 10 answers. Even if nobody knows what cloud computing really is, one thing is certain: if internet searches are any indication of interest and uptake, this year will be a big year for cloud computing. A quick search on Google Trends reveals that just this year, the volume of searches for "cloud computing" began to overtake searches for the more mainstream topics like "virtualization".

So what's all the buzz about? Is cloud-computing revolutionary, or