On the way to Information Society

A bit over a year ago I blogged about how to plan services (F) For user experience to be pleasant, the service needs to have all bits and pieces in balance.

A good example of nice experience is how you plan your Google front page. Some might say "nonsense", but I love it for showing me news headlines at a glance. I also love beauty; so this is how my iGoogle looks like.

This year's foot ball finals (F) was my first game ever (en spite of the fact that I loved Goal! a lot). Fanny, our cat, got so excited, too, that we took some snapshots to share with our friends.

I'm a Picasa user (over Flickr) for the simple reason of user accounts: I already had an account with Google. Oh, how I'd love OpenID: the less accounts (and passwords), the better!

To my regret, I have a Nokia E90 instead of an iPhone, so sharing photos has been a pain in the neck. Google's Picasa offered a good option to do the trick via email. Fast and easy, and the results you can see here.

Social media opens new horizons also to government officers, those wanting to share experiences, learn from one another and create new innovation. I believe we need to speed up the development: all too few of us use tools enabling bigger productivity or crowd-sourcing type of innovation.

Public sector in Finland (perhaps the whole country, too) is still in the phase of slow adaption with Twitter - and I wouldn't have the time to wait =) LinkedIn is more used but, all too often, poorly so. Facebook is all the more famous but mostly used for private purposes. (Dear reader, a word of warning: the previous estimation is based on my professional public sector networks and may not represent the whole truth)

I am part of a big team SADe (F) that is building information society and eGovernment in Finland. I'm not saying that government offices' first priorities lie with tweets or sharing photos, but my few examples above are definitely worth learning from. Information society should be innovative and easy to use.

What needs to be gained, in my experience of a year as a blogger, is networking, sharing and enriching the experiences. Only thus can we benefit and speed up the learning curve.

That's how innovation is spread. First there was Gutenberg's printing press. Today we blog to spread our thoughts.

My blog at Arjen tietoyhteiskunta (F - unfortunately not translated).