No, not living in the sky like that city at the end of The Empire Strikes Back where Harrison Ford gets immobilised in chocolate. Have you ever:

• Rented a CD or DVD?
• Borrowed a book from a Library?
• Used a car club?
• Watched a movie on demand?
• Downloaded MP3s?
• Shared garden tools with your neighbours?

If ‘yes’ then you’ve done a bit of “cloud living” according to this month’s Wired magazine (article not available online). This is a snappy new term for a business strategy I’ve been promoting for years – product-service systems – delivering the service required by consumers without giving them ownership of a tangible product. This has significant environmental benefits – downloading an album on MP3 saves 40-80% of the carbon of buying a CD. The cloud analogy has been borrowed from ‘cloud computing’ – where all software and storage is on-line and your computer is simply a portal to the cloud (eg Google Docs). ‘Cloud living’ is a more attractive term than ‘product-service system’ and it also has the perspective of the consumer rather than the producer which propel it into the public arena.
Only one problem – if you google the term itself, it also means people who make money off the internet (selling ebooks etc) without any fixed base – allowing them to pursue the lifestyle they want (surfing, snow boarding and other cool things). Of course these are two are different sides (production/consumption) of the same coin, but as always it will take time to determine whether the consumption element of cloud living sticks.