We all remember that heart-wrenching Spielberg period drama from 1993, Schindler's List. The film told the true-to-life tale about the German superindustrialist Oskar Schindler, who succeeded marvellously in saving the lives of hundreds of WWII persecutees and concentration camp victims, those who were destined to perish at the hands of the dastardly Nazi cabal.

"These are mine!" Schindler would brazenly rage at the camp sentries and brownshirted subordinates, bellowing furiously as he stormed into the various compounds across Poland where Europe's perennial downtrodden and most famous, violently-persecuted minority were being held incommunicado, against their will. Until then, these were the most unsanitary, inhumane, unpseakable conditions known to man before places like Cambodia, Rwanda, Congo, and Srebrenica even came into the lexicon.

As the history books duly relate, Mr. Schindler was successful beyond his wildest aspirations. He set out to protect "his" people, preventing them from falling into the grinding jaws of the Nazi slaughter machine. He was posthumously declared a "Righteous Person" by the same people whom he'd saved.

All of this somehow reminds me of several collaborative tools I've been using of late on the web. Sites with names like YouFig, Tangler, and Twitter, a trio of dub-dub-dubs which I'll be sharing with you today.

Okay, starting from first principles:

I'm making my own bold Schindler-ian announcement to all those prehistoric neanderthals in our Czech midst -- yes, I'm speaking directly to our so-called "elected" representatives over at Parliament and the Senate: you will not touch my Czechs!

My Czechs, you ask?

I'm talking about the young generation of up-and-comers...those young Generation "C's" who are emerging freshly from Czech wombs, clueless as to the machinations of those stuffing their cakeholes up on our Gilded Hill. Those blue- and green-eyed innocent, aspiring, and open-minded babes. Those for whom the world's possibilities exist in spades in about the most interconnected planet known to man's short history.

Through successive waves of consciousness bashing, indoctrination, false nationalism, EU skepticism, an always-say-die attitude, and the potential poisoning of their dumplings and daily bread by evil parents, educators, and bureaucrats, our otherwise young stellar citizens of the Czech Republic are becoming pliable navel-gazing golems who walk the streets of Czech cities wondering what hit them.

But an antidote to all this exists! And I'm going to tell you where to find it:

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YouFig:

My team and I have been using this Middle Eastern-designed collaborative Web 2.0 tool for about a pair of months now. We've been enjoying quite a bit of success with it, to boot.

YouFig (short for "you configure" or "you figure it out" -- and I've been bugging the owners to insert a "please" in there for user-friendliness) acts as a central depot where various interest groups can come together -- temporarily or for the long-haul -- to share notes, documents, YouTube clips, to-do's, flames, and the like. A place where they can manage their invitee lists or even incorporate cutting-edge tools like Google Maps in ways that, say, Google Documents, cannot.

The company is helmed by those same godly people behind the creation of ICQ; so that's telling you quite a bit about what destiny has in store for this particular operation (notice the proliferation of the ICQ app in the Czech lands).

YouFig organizes all of its offerings into a concept known as the "workgroup." I've set up several of them -- under certain rubrics -- which my staff checks back with on a regular basis and which I encourage my team to use to contact me with feedbacks.

To be sure, it's a bit unnatural at the outset. But with good habits, YouFig will likely make its break into the Czech mainstream this year. As we all know, what works here will eventually trickle further east, as our neighbours bow in deference to our superior intellectual and US-supported power -- about the closest our 10 million citizens will come to that sobriety-slaying "superpower feeling."


Tangler:

This one's a beaut, kids.

It's run by a nice Australian girl by the name of Prabitha Rai down in Sydney and is actually one of the more effective discussion forums on the web today.

Tangler offers an easy way to kickstart a discussion about practically anything, keeping thread links about as organized as any other service you'll find online, anywhere.

To wit, we've got a few discussions up there at present about THE NATO QUESTION, which you'll of course have already covered at several large Czech news aggregators (I cannot name them here specifically as they are our competition). I encourage you to supply your answers to it as well, so feel free to chime in. (I can invite you if you email me offline).

I like Tangler, because it vaults over the typical command-and-control structures which persist in Czech work circles despite the more democratized nature of the web. Web tools -- especially "Web 2.0" tools -- are ideally supposed to level out the playing field, to allow young Czechs with degrees and honorifics "up the wazoo" to strut their stuff and introduce their innovative ideas to the world.

Sadly, the horror stories persist. Several of my Czech confreres tell me during Chamber of Commerce shindigs and the like that surreptitious attempts by certain Czech employers to undermine their staffs are alive and well, men and women who try to roll back the Czech progress clock to old "CSR-style" methods [ed.'s note: the former Czechoslovakia].

Tools like Tangler will kill that off. Tangler will strangle the Czech dinosaurs in their tracks, condemning them to the sandy depths as is their fate, to be discovered by prospectors centuries later as "black gold," those who hold the rest of us at ransom, like our Arab friends today of the Gulf and in Arabia.


Twitter:

Alright, and if you haven't heard about Twitter yet, then you're likely spending too much time at the hospoda/herna, at the the chalupa, or crossing tasks off someone else's priority list (which beggars the question -- whose time are you really serving anyways?!).

Twitter is for you "early adopters" out there (after the innovators), opinion leaders in your various communities.

People like you are known as trend setters and tempo-ists, whose word is taken as the closest thing to "gospel" in this land of 1000 church spires, yet where the Higher Power is derided and cursed as frequently as the Windows95 operating system once was.

Twitter answers the very simple question: "What am I doing?"

It's not chatting. It's not ICQ. It's not even email. Hell no! It's 140 characters of bliss.

You can choose to follow people of your liking and learn about the better tools to be found out there on the web.

You won't learn what I'm eating, how I feel, nor about the present traffic conditions in Prague's Inner District. What it will do, rather, is save you a mess of trouble tracking down those pieces of information you'd otherwise have to do plenty of rifling around to find.

For all of you marketers out there, here's a HOT TIP: follow Jeremiah Owyang.

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So my message today to those prehistoric creatures occupying our seats of decision-making power: Keep your meathooks off "my" Czechs! It's their pure minds, not yours for the robbing!

And since you won't listen a lick to what I'm saying, young Czechs now have:

YouFig
Tangler
and
Twitter

to pull the rug out from under you.


Hezky weekend,
Mejte se,
and as always, I wish you the very best of things,
ADM