I, Cowbirdy

I’ve been using the website Cowbird for just over a month now. Developed by artist Jonathan Harris as a new type of platform to share stories of our life experiences with each other, the site offers space to create something that is more meditative than the fast moving, frequently updated, timelines we currently use to connect on the Internet. Cowbird then enables those stories to be seen in the wider context of shared human story. And while the content of the site may hold more weight than other mediums, the functionality remains as light, contemporary and organic to use as any you’ll find on the web. These qualities of chewing the cud (Cow) while remaining swift and breezy (bird) are what make Cowbird what it is. And what makes it's users, Cowbirdy.

Each story created inhabits it’s own page on the Cowbird website where it can be seen as a lone entry, a single picture with accompanying text and/or audio. User added metadata includes information such as dates, locations with maps and character profiles for people appearing in the stories, or to whom a story can be dedicated. The metadata, as well as giving background texture to individual stories, allows them to be grouped into mosaic story pages searchable by tags and themes uniting story collections grouped say by, ‘Family’ or ‘Coffee’ or that feature a specific person or city. The more metadata added, the more collections a story shows up in. Stories can be as short and sweet or as in depth as you want to make them. Both sorts equally meaningful.

The storyteller community adds other levels of focus to how stories are collated, as people ‘love’ stories on the site helping those most widely appreciated entries to be found easily. Storytellers can also join the audience of other users to follow their particular additions on the site. And for social creatures like myself who love free flowing streams, Cowbird has an easy share tool for many social networks.

The site has another function, that of documenting the widespread human events of our time as they happen, the first of which is the Occupy movement. The mosaic pages compiling story, whether individually journalistic documentation, poetic creations or a mixture of both, collectively create a saga of human story that is both anthropological and bardic in nature, and offers a collective and unique view into the ways that events are experienced by people and time. Quite a work of art, and it’s alive and growing.

Still in it’s early infancy, Cowbird has already adapted to become even more fluid to use and I’ve found that because of the way it’s designed, I have been able to write on Cowbird about things that are hard express directly into the maelstrom of facebook or twitter, and that felt too personal to dump on a blog where they wouldn’t make sense or would disappear, pushed down a tunnel of chronological posts and forgotten.

Cowbird has so far proved a fantastic heart home to house my own story collection and to be reinfoced by the expression of others (as I had encountered with Jonathan’s own stories, created during his time building Cowbird) and as stories on the site retain a lively immediacy, sharing them in a place where they will last and remain vibrant, feels very spiritually enriching. As virtual spaces go, it’s a really nice place to reside.

Cowbird is looking for photographers, writers, filmmakers, journalists, etc. and if you want to join the storytelling community, you can request an invitation.