What is "the cloud"?

With all of this talk in popular media of "the cloud" I would like to clarify it's definition for all of our sanity.

I, at first, checked the trusty site wikipedia.org and was handed this brilliant definition:

" Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction "

and promptly thought "What?!".

That may make sense to businesses who like to use hip phrases like "rapidly provisioned" (quickly supplied) to sound official but what does it mean to the common person. Let me help out with that:

If something is in "the cloud" it means you can access it using the internet, normally with your web browser.

Simple eh?

Many people are already using cloud services. The most popular being web-based email such as gmail, yahoo mail, and msn mail.  Which put all of the complication of maintaining your email in the hands of the corporation. No installing expensive software, no compressing databases, simple.

I hope this helps.