First it was journals, where we created a special look for ourselves and wrote in code and found a place on the Internet to hosts our marvelous prose. We set up "notify lists" where we would write notes to all of our subscribers to tell them that we had written something else that they surely were not going to want to miss.
Then sites like Blogger made it easier. Now you didn't really have to do any design, unless you wanted to, and all you had to do was to type the prose. It formatted it for you, put all the entries together, added something called "rss feed," so people could click a button and be automatically subscribed to your words, which would automatically be delivered to them every time you uploaded.
Then came My Space and Facebook and now your words went into a gigantic social network where people could play scrabble when they went to read your insights on the day's headlines, or tell you how many times the puppy pooped that day--and where.
Now comes the ultimate in sharing your life with the world: Utterz. (Yes, of course I have an Utterz account. No luddite I!) Now you don't even have to write anything. You call a telephone number somewhere in Iowa and you record your thoughts. The recording magically appears on the Utterz page and their software even adds it to your blog so people subscribing to your blog expecting to see your words of wisdom can now hear your words of wisdom and whatever photo or video you wish to attach to those words.
(I am reminded of a line from The Big Voice: God or Merman, when Jim and Steve move to Los Angeles and say "We no longer had to walk that exhausting block to the A&P; we could drive the half block to Ralph's.")
Utterz also sends a link to your message to Twitter, that social network where you describe what is going on in your day in 140 characters or less. Those who don't subscribe to your blog can then go to Utterz and also hear your pearls of wisdom.
It's all much fun. My Scrabulous friend Tojosan from Flickr (or Todd Jordan as he is known in real life, and on Twitter and on Facebook) was the first Utterz to grab my attention when I read about it on Flickr.
(Aren't all you non-internet folk just banging your heads against the wall about now???)
Todd routinely updates to Utterz. This morning I was hearing about his experience with his lovely wife Sharon (NanaJ on Flickr) at the marriage retreat they are attending.
Dave Delaney sends Utterz about his kids and plugging his podcast, "Two Boobs and a Baby." His last Utter was of his toddler singing. The world is VERY happy that Utterz was not in existence when our kids were growing up, I'm sure!!!
AnnOhio lives somewhere in...well...Ohio. Her first Utter talked about standing in a cornfield being cold and wondering if it was going to snow and later waxed eloquent on the various ways on can have french fries
But I knew I had found a soulmate with OzaMeilleur when I heard her rambling on about taking her dog out for a walk and how many times it had pooped or peed on the walk.
Wicked Stepmom brought me back to the worst of times mothering, with her recording of her stepdaughter screaming. The entry was called "Mommy drinks because you cry" and she added the following explanation: (She's crying b/c I took the fork away from her AFTER she put several gashed in the NEW kitchen table with it. And then, as I was struggling with crapass tmobile & my sidekick to post this damn photo she walked over to the utensil cabinet, got a new fork, came back to the table, held out the fork to me, said "HAHA!" and proceeded to happily finish her dinner.)
Yes it's a whole new world with Utterz, a whole new way to get to know people, a whole new way to waste even more time, a whole new way to voluntarily give up the privacy you are angry with the government for taking away from you as you spit all of your thoughts, dreams, frustrations, ambitions and plans out onto the internet for anyone to see.
I want to say this is the ultimate, but probably next week someone will devise an easier way -- say, by attaching electrodes to your brain so that your thoughts can be broadcast to your BrainWave account automatically without you having to do anything at all.
I think the notion of anonymity is totally dead unless you live somewhere in a cave in Afghanistan.
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