A teacher could easily create a preconfigured system with data for all of the students in a class and allow them to start work immediately.

It offers great potential for innovation. These data sets can be mashed up with other public data sets or web services to create new applications. One need only look at the variety of imaginative mashups currently out on the web to recognize that these data sets could form the basis for many new applications -- most of which can't even be envisioned beforehand, but once available immediately strike one as inventive.

Amazon's continued progress in pioneering new means of system creation and new types of computer systems is exciting. I recently posted about its CloudFront content delivery initiative -- unexpected yet perfectly sensible once understood. With these public data sets, Amazon continues to increase the volume and variety of its offerings -- unlike many other recently announced cloud initiatives from other companies, which seem to be mostly focused on migrating existing products to a new hosting model (aka "your mess for less"). I can't wait to see what's next.

Bernard Golden is CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus, which specializes in virtualization, cloud computing and related issues. He is also the author of "Virtualization for Dummies," the best-selling book on virtualization to date.