So I was going to say "Sunshine for this weekend", a "delicious dessert" or some other useless fashion item but actually no, I would like to talk a little bit about things I learned listening to the radio today.

It happens once in a while that I tune in while brushing my hair or going to the shower. It can be just to kill the silence around me while Mr. F takes his nap or hear about the new movies out this week, nota bene, movies I will NOT be able to see at the cinema. Today I tuned in to France Culture and listened to an interview with France's IT minister (the name in French is so unbelievably complicated: "secrétaire d'Etat chargée de la prospective et du développement de l'économie numérique") so lets say she stands in for economic progress in connective technology. Whatever that means.

Not that her own name is much easier either so at risk of sounding patronising I am going to call Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet only by her first name. And not because she is a woman.

So Nathalie has been chosen to get this country up and running with new technologies and listening to her, she seems quite qualified for the job. A young parlementary, she understands how the internet and technologies around it work (she has her own Facebook and Twitter account) and she sees new oportunities in how to use the web. Nathalie says that the main mistake people make is to try to use the web as just another medium, to advertise products just as on Tv or radio for example. But the trick lies in seeing what the web can do differently from other media and to use it. Focus on how we can use differently. What she also would like to do is to involve citizens more in the IT progress itself, because administration (or governments for that matter) are not always the best qualified to know HOW to USE their data - Therefore, and basing this on similar tactics planned by the Obama administration ("government 2.0" ), she plans to make most government data publicly available (anonymosly of course) and encourage ordinary citizens to come up with ideas of how to use it.

Interesting. How this would work in real life is hard to say. Especially in a big country like France, where you still have to have a million photocopies of all your papers and even sometimes FAX them to their destination. Of course its hard to "computerized" all the data available, and progress is being made (you can even do your tax report online now) but France is still far away from using modern technologies to make everyday life easier for everybody. Your bank could send you text messages for example - and when you get a prescription at the doctor's, he/she should be able to email it directly to the pharmacy (and social security) to avoid all this paperwork. Scanning and documents in email attachements should also be made more available in the system. I dont know how much I have spent on stamps this year -but it's alot.

Other interesting points in the interview are how resources (or investment) in new technologies are now going to ideas and Uses, instead of equipment development before. And France should be quite upfront there, in developing computer games for better uses (such as for Alzheimer patients or work training and progress). Catching up on their own IT bubble perhaps?

You can read more on Obama's "government 2.0" here.