Science and Industry

Sorry for missing the last week posting: I was enjoying working hard in Nokia stand at Assembly Summer 2008. That’s an event for geeks in Finland; demos, presentations, computer games, hardware… Our place there was to present some devices and demos, one being JellyPop; free game that you can share with your friends.

But I also had good conversations, one of them being what is Web3.0, which was mentioned in the maemo-notifications. But to understand what web3.0 might be we really need to understand what web2.0 or social media means.

While browsing the web I found out Movial-corporation view of this: they speak out convergence but actually what I would want to highlight is that social media should be something where social interactions happens. As easy as this sounds, I have been hearing some presentations of social media with no aspects of social interaction there.

But what is also important to understand that the web has been social for a while: chat and irc are rather old technologies that enable social interaction. What is the difference is userbase, number of connected persons in the internet is totally different today than it was when I was really young (we had a modem connected to our home pc for some time in the mid-90s).

This is really important to understand: the social media or most of web2.0ness isn’t about technology nor site desing: it’s about the mindset. It’s about being open and more user generation and centric thing (at least as I saw the terms). And this is what I sometimes think people who speak about these things miss around; using wiki as a content management system is a good example — wiki is especially meant for the cases where the author wants everyone to contribute; and with this blog I want to express my toughs but I don’t want you to edit them…

One intresting thing is the amount of girls there. It was rather high, more than one would expect. This is just a side note so that I can link this feminism and geeks. Genders and information technology is something we need to tackle more; usual argument in gender studies is there is some inbuild “malethinking” — is the case also in itc world and how would things change if we consider both sexes? Have your say here!

Next time I hope to have actual work content, not just my toughts here.

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.