The blogosphere is catching fire with speculation that Google, in its quest to sift through and organize the world's information, may be introducing a so-called Google Drive, or GDrive, allowing all those willing to have their information scanned by Google to use the service as a virtual external hard drive for storage and retrieval. Various bloggers point to an entry on Greg Linden's blog. Linden refers to the PowerPoint slides and their accompanying text comments from Google's presentation to analysts last week.

Though Google subsequently removed the PPT file from its site, replacing it with a PDF of the slides without the comments, various bloggers using Google's cache feature were able to piece together the missing comments.

Among those PPT comments: "With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc). We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today."

Googling Google's Garett Rogers notes, "In September I ran across compelling evidence that suggests a product by this name was either in the works, or at least being considered — at that time it was nothing more than speculation. Now, according to these notes it isn't far from reality."

The question of how Google will make money from the service remains unanswered.

Other citations from Google's PPT presentation, via Jack Schofield on the Guardian's Technology Blog"

"As we move toward the 'Store 100%' reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine."

"Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user's data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be access across applications. For example: a user's Orkut profile has more value when it's accessible from Gmail (as addressbook), Lighthouse (as access list), etc."

Schofield adds: "This is a classic Evil Empire idea. If it was proposed by IBM or Microsoft, it would be dismissed as deranged. And Google is, of course, exactly the same sort of multibillion dollar multinational corporation as IBM and Micrososft, even though it claims to be different ("Do no evil"). It's a strategy that George Orwell would appreciate."