Science and Industry

Everything good ends some day: today before 9 am I walked back to my workplace at Ruoholahti. Well, actually I was sort of glad: it’s nice to be there and do something useful. Today I started getting everything I planed to do before the holiday done. Luckily I didn’t have pile of mails in the inbox, using mobile mail during holiday helped with this well know issue and kept me well in the cutting edge. As I said to my buddy at the office: “My summer holiday? I just worked less than usually.” Maybe later on I could analyze the relationship of work, school and freetime…

But it was break after all. The short break for my brains was rather usefu. Today I made some modifications to user survey and asked for comments. I made progress with service metrics. I still need to rewrite the Mindtrek-paper The Use of Ubiquitous Media in Politics – How ubiquitous life effects into political life today and what might happen in the future. I’ll keep this blog posted on the development of it — but the core idea is that new technological tools like video sharing and location based services might have something to offer also for political life.

But, actually this is my last full day at the office this week. Tomorrow I’m in Nokia House for lunch date and generally just stop by. From Wednesday to Sunday I’m supporting the Summer Assembly team and thus working remotly most likely from the scene.

Still on holiday, but time to do some minor things into the site itself. First about the full version: a new look and feel coming up. I’m not so good with images, but they give a certain feel into the blog. I had huge plans in my mind, but here’s the realization. Maybe again later with help of real experts.

The other, more technical thing is mobile (simple) view of the site. I know most of the cool devices, like iPhone, N95, N810 etc. should be able to handle this site well. But, the variety of internet enabled devices is bigger. I’ve used Opera Mini on top of Series 40 device and started to like the less is more approach of websites. And for some services, like textual view (Finnish newspaper) I use textual view also on regular desktop. It’s faster and cleaner, no extra flash-ads everywhere.

But to other things then. My brother asked if I could have a look at Movino-system: he plans if live streaming could be somehow used in his work. I promised to have a look with that. But, more generally, the tech persons are using services like Qik to share live video on the spot. I did my trials with ComVu and noticed one problem: I’m not ready to walk in the city and film everything I share to internet (I tried that during the New Year party 2008): the privacy issue is difficult.

I see the possibilities this would allow, but some things bother me. Maybe I’m too old for this Internet world, but let’s take the example of Google’s Street view — really interesting idea. But at the same time I feel that it might share my whereabouts into the world; but not only that but also details like who are with me. Plans like blurring faces might not be enough: those who know me well might notice my hat which makes me rather easy to spot.

Of course this is not the only thing: services that involve sharing may have same kind of problems: when everything is stored is there any way I can control what’s out of me? I’m waiting to here about Nokia Chat and it’s automatically presence updates and location sharing possibilities. As Conversations site asks: how open we want to be?

Dr. Wesch pointed out rather important thing in famous The Computer is Us/ing us: we need to rethink certain things, like privacy. Maybe I’ll blog more when I understand more of this tiny but important word.

I’m now in the warm sunny Finland… Well, it’s not raining which is a good thing. I got the permission to put this blog out and as I’m a bit too much excited I started to do it now and then the main view was a bit too empty to keep it that way.

Okay, I hope you noticed the two pages left: I’ll tell a bit of myself and then about this blog. As said, I’m a seasonal trainee in the huge corporation, but that really tells nothing of what I do. So… For the last month I’ve been in the services and software side, working on service metrics related problems and then helped the coders a bit with user interface giving my ideas and comments of their plans.

What service metrics really mean? Let’s take this slowly (as I’m a social scientist, too much technology talk might cause dizziness): every time you visit a web service something is logged into the system. The idea of the task given to me was that by going trough these logs we get some user patters and then analyze the needs a bit better and thus create a better service.

That was rather quantitative approach to user experience and I like qualitative analysis also. So my plan also to write some sort of question pattern which we can use to better understand why people want to use the service — or why not? Is it related to concept side problems or maybe the technical implementation didn’t work for this user. And hopefully we have a better service this way also. The dialogue is a key element of a good service.

But on work side, I have nothing more to say for now — I’ll just relax a bit before getting back to the office 28.7. Hopefully I’ll be able to share a bit more then. But, in the meantime: if you have questions or ideas what you want to hear from me: use to comment box!