Cloud computing terminology has been rising in popularity lately, and rising rather fast:

Here are some of my thoughts:

1. I think Amazon first used the word "cloud" in their Elastic Cloud (EC) offering (I may be wrong here about first). When I first heard this it sounded silly but catchy, like an mturk they have. Technically, EC2 is a Xen infrastructure for rent with on-demand provisioning capabilities. Nothing more, nothing less.
2. I have no idea what cloud computing actually is. I can guess – but I don't care. I still prefer good old Grid Computing as an industry accepted terminology.
3. Grid computing arena seems to be going through a superficial name change every year or two: HPC->Grid Computing->Utility or On-Demand Computing-> Virtualization->Cloud Computing. Not only these changes sprung in blogosphere – but sometimes companies do an overnight change in their entire messaging. Case in point is DataSynapse that has changed its message from grid computing to virtualization literally overnight (entire website, PRs, white-papers, etc.) about 2 years ago and now seems to be going through the same change again. Comical...
4. As expected, certain companies claim they invented cloud computing way before we knew about cloud computing. In separate news Al Gore claims he invented Internet before... it was invented.
5. The motives are always clear for companies that are trying to chase the latest FUD in naming: they are attempting to differentiate on naming and positioning while struggling to make a difference in technology or features of the product.

I think the "Cloud" FUD will subside and something else will grab the attention. We already had a "swarm computing" so may it will be a "mist computing" or a "puff computing" or even a "haze infrastructure"