Dial +420 246 019 060

Well, before you do that, I suggest you have a squizz at Utterz.com to discover for yourself the latest citizen journalism craze to hit the Prague streets ever since the advent of the mobile telephone in our fair republic.

First it was email.

Then it was webblogs, more commonly referred to as "blogs."

In both cases, the uptake was rather slow and most people found it cumbersomely odd to use email as a means of regularly staying in touch. We all remember those days: "Can I send you an email?" The inevitable reply: "Sorry, I don't use email to stay in touch." Blogs were even more macabre as a means of archiving thoughts on a given handful of key topics, for that matter.

But our citizens quickly took these two killer technologies up. Czechs, in their perennial capacity for being open to new technologies and their tendency for "consumer trial," in the marketing sense of the term.

Now there's a new kid on the block and it's called Utterz.

No, not some kind of Czech code for the word Úterý (Tuesday), what with the transposing of the "z" and "y" keys on the Czech keyboard (cheers to Ivana for pointing this out!), but utterance, as in vyrok, as in the ability to pick up your mobile phone, dial in the above 9 digits, and plainly comment about something going on at your given coordinates, the instant it happens.

I for one have been "uttering" a lot lately.

One of my pet theories is that Utterz.com will be precisely the thing that brings candidate NATO (and newly-democratic) nations like Ukraine and Georgia into the full-on Western fold. When a citizen can become his/her own anchorperson, leapfrogging the traditional journalistic chain of command to supply news about a given happening to the world in less than five minutes, you know another one of those "colour" revolutions is on the horizon. I originally uttered about it here.

I didn't agree with bloggi's reply to that utter, which basically refuted my findings, with bloggi claiming that with greater citizen surveillance on the part of these nations' secret services -- not to mention incursions by Russian cloak and dagger types into the domestic affairs of these former Soviet satellite republics -- fewer people be inclined to use cellphones as a way to get information out about injustices occurring in their society.

Here's a thought: How effective would state police and goons have been in the various scrums of 2004's Ukraine during its Orange Revolution?

Imagine people being able to dial in their reflections from street level, camped out in Kyiv's Independence Square in pup tents, protesting hard for their man Yushchenko? Imagine these same people armed with cellphones, reporting on the spot to Ukrainian relatives abroad who would then convey this fresh information onward to Western media services, bypassing the standard channels?

I encourage our locals to make greater use of this new tool for the simple reason that it's a great conversation starter. The rawer, the better, goes my vote.

There's more than enough to protest about in Cesko these days. You'll need to graft on more fingers and toes, as you'll likely lose count enumerating using the traditional methods.

Wishing you the best of things,
ADM


ps the access number again is +420 246 019 060