Life, stories, and the beauty of slowing
down
Do give Cowbird a visit. It's at
www.cowbird.com. Go on, go ahead. You can visit it while reading this, or
during lunch break, or during those rainy nights at home.
No pressure. It's not going away, and
you're in no hurry to catch it. But do yourself a favour and give ita you'll
see just how brilliant it is.
As
they call it, Cowbird is the Wikipedia for Life.
What's Cowbird? Cowbird is a storytelling
tool. It's also a place where life, stories, people and the World come together
in a place, and you can read them as you would in a library. Cowbird is a
community of storytellers -- writers and journalists and photographers and
artists and filmmakers and many other things — who share their thoughts and
experiences in words and pictures. Cowbird could be many things. Cowbird is a
story told at firelight. Cowbird is a picture of a tree and the song behind it.
Cowbird is about a day in a life, or a true story about chocolates.
In Technicality, Cowbird is a social
networking site, but it takes the idea of sharing into a different light.
Instead of having people share a status update or a twitpic of yesterday's
mouldy lunch, Cowbird lets people share stories -- real, actual stories, told
in words and pictures and imagination. It's an alternative to the shorter,
faster mindset of digital lives today, requesting that you slow down and delve
into the deeper part of things. It's how social networking can be more human, a
departure from how robotic we can be in our social network experiences.
You enter Cowbird and you simply pick an
image to read a story about. They could be long or short, or in prose or
poetry. They can be real or they can be dreams. They can be a journal entry of
a day, or a documentation of Things That Matter in the world.
It is a social network of stories, and you
can just stay there and read and see the world in their eyes.
Cowbird
is created by Jonathan Harris
Cowbird is created by Jonathan Harris, a
maker of projects that often reimagines human-technology interaction with one
another. He has co-created projects like "We Feel Fine", which
measures emotional temperature of humans through large-scale blog analysis, as
well as "Balloons of Bhutan", lich is a "portrait of happiness the
last Himalayan kingdom."
Contributing to Cowbird is still on an
"Invitation Only" basis, which you can request for by directly
contacting them, but the real joy to Cowbird is the sitting down and finding
the snippets of stories, each an individual and a part of a larger one -- one
as large as the world, telling you how wonderful the world is, in ways you
haven't seen. Go ahead. Go on for the ride.
