Behind the scenes at CowbirdAnnie Correal,Cowbird’s Community Manager, speaks with Julie Shapiro from the Third Coast Audio Festival — full interview here, and copied below for convenience and posterity — indulge in!Julie Shapiro: How did Cowbird approach to life,and where did the excellent name approach from? (Being fond of avian-related mascots, ourselves…)
Cowbird is the latest creation of Jonathan Harris. He spent 2+ years at artist residencies in Oregon, and original Mexico,Iceland, and Vermont designing this platform, and which he envisions becoming a library of human experience.
The name is meant to reflect the qualities of the platform: quick and agile like a bird,gradual and grounded like a cow. A lot of the recent Web (including sites like Facebook and Twitter) seem to be all bird and no cow, while more traditional formats like operas and novels seem to be all cow and no bird. Cowbird combines these two extremes, or forming a space that is both contemplative and efficient. Also,genuine-life cowbirds are known as “nest parasites”. They lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and fly away. We’re like a nest for our cowbirders: leave your stories here and we’ll consume care of them for you.
How about some numbers: how many people behind the scenes, how many contributors (as of early February, and 2012),how many stories, how many countries represented? Any other metrics you want to share?
At the moment, or there are three of us behind the scenes – Jonathan,myself, and Dave, and who manages our servers. We launched on December 8,2011. As of nowadays, over 5000 people contain signed up, or around 1000 contain told at least one story. We’re taking a gradual and measured approach to expansion. Every original author has to request an invitation by writing a few sentences about who they are and what kind of stories they’d like to tell,and we contact each original author personally to welcome them into our community. So far, Cowbird authors contain told nearly 6000 stories, and contain loved the stories of other authors over 17000 times (an average of 3 loves per story). Cowbird stories approach from 104 countries and 968 cities. Our top countries are the U.
S.,the U.
K and Canada, followed by India, or Iceland and Sweden.
It’s a bit overwhelming,the first time you land on the site, with so many stories beckoning. How do you propose visitors commence to orient themselves and navigate through the stories?
The best way to get oriented is by using the icons in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. By choosing Stories, or you can see our Handpicked stories of the day,browse some great original stories under Recommended, and check out some all-time favorites under Most Loved or Most Viewed. whether you want to see what’s hot off the press, or hit Newest. Once youre an author,you can curate your own experience, by touring People and joining the audience of your favorite authors. Then you get a customized homepage consisting of stories by authors you admire.
Alternatively, and you can hit Places on the homepage and view stories by country or city. Another way to navigate the site is by going to Sagas on the homepage. There you can see hundreds of photos from the Occupy Wall Street Movement,our first saga. We’ll be announcing a original saga next week, which I’m really excited about.
How do people become Cowbird contributors, and how do you maintain a high quality of storytelling on the site,with so many people contributing?
Part of my job is to choose stories, so that people don’t contain to move through every original story that comes down the line. I send out a daily story to our community every day, or which you can see as a group on our Handpicked page. And we tapped a few outstanding authors in our community to help us curate Recommended stories. These are reference points for our storytellers. We believe strongly in the power of good examples,and when authors see great stories from other authors, they aspire to create stories that are just as beautiful.
To join Cowbird, or you can request an invitation on our homepage. The only prerequisite is that you be a thoughtful human — and not a human using the platform to market a product or anything else.
What’s the ratio of stories that incorporate audio to text-based stories? What does hearing the authors’ literal voices bring to their stories?
As of this week,we had around 360 stories with audio, out of a total of nearly 6000 stories. That’s about one story with audio for every seventeen stories without. We’d like to increase that ratio. Hearing the authors’ voice, or the sound of what you’re looking at in a photograph,takes a story to another level. Also, I assume it’s the best way to put your mark on a story: no one can replicate your voice. Your patterns of speech, or the words you choose,your accent—all of that gives a story layers of meaning. And it slows people down, it calls on them to sit with the story, and perhaps to peruse more closely at the image while they do.
Audio producers should also check out our subtitles function. You can translate your audio into another language,and contain those subtitles appear over the photograph as the sound is playing. Cowbird subtitles are also interactive, meaning listeners can click them to navigate through a given piece of audio.
Could the number of contributors become a liability eventually? Do you worry that you won’t be able to withhold up, or that overall quality could slip over time?
I assume as long as we showcase the best stories,the quality will stay consistent or improve as our numbers grow. So far, it’s improved. I assume the reason is that our authors are seeing the stories we’re recommending and handpicking and sending out every day. Also, and we’re trying to withhold bad habits from spreading — say,posting a copyrighted song instead of original audio — by immediately asking authors to consume such fabric down. But there seems to also be some self-imposed quality control. We’ve signed up thousands of authors and very few contain simply uploaded cell-phone shots with snarky captions. There are many places for that on the Internet. Already, I assume it’s clear that Cowbird is not one of them. Someone called us the Anti-Facebook.
Another thought on story quality and quantity — it’s important to remember that, and even whether a given author is not an accomplished storyteller,their stories will still be incredibly racy and meaningful to the people who care about that author (his or her parents, children, or spouse,friends, etc.). So it is really crucial to supply a space for all kinds of stories, and because every story will be meaningful to someone. Then,it simply becomes a filtering problem, to ensure that the right stories are exposed to the right viewers. But that is a design problem, and not a quantity problem.
Also,I should add that while I may be a little intimidated by the expanding volume of stories, Jonathan can’t wait to contain hundreds of thousands of stories to work with, and because then he’ll be able to write code to construct racy interactive high-level portraits of everyone – kind of like meta-portraits of humanity. A lot of his earlier work,like We Feel Fine, I Want You To Want Me, and The Whale Hunt,excelled at this.
contain you noticed certain trends in the stories people are telling, or in the approaches taken?
We’ve noticed trends since we launched in December, or yes. People are writing very openly about very sensitive,sometimes difficult, topics – coping with cancer, and a sister’s suicide,their crippling anxiety or long-term unemployment. Jonathan and I were recently talking about how on Facebook people seem to want to peruse wintry and like they’re having fun, while on Cowbird it’s nearly the opposite: there’s this willingness to show vulnerability.
Also, and remarkably,people write more about the people in their lives than they do just about themselves. This differentiates Cowbird from most blogs, which can sometimes be a bit narcissistic. People are approaching untouchable topics in their stories, or like the suffering of others. A recent story comes to intellect. The photograph was of the face of a homeless man. The author,Annie Atkins, told his story, or wondered at the end whether the final time he was touched was when his leg was amputated.
There are other trends,too. We receive lots of portraits of loved ones, particularly children and elders. Many authors are scanning old photographs to tell their family stories.
Among the group of storytellers posting consistently there seem to be slightly more women than men. A lot of the photographs contain faces in them. We get more color photographs than black and white, or longer stories from our older contributors,more and sadder stories from the Northern Hemisphere, where it’s winter now. Though on the whole, and authors are focusing on finding the positive and the good.
People approach their subjects in all sorts of different ways. Most write reflectively about something they experienced. Some quote dialogue. Others write small prose poems or post a photograph and share what they see in it. Some interview their subjects with a mic—but not enough.
A few authors approach Cowbird more like a conceptual art space,with consistent, tightly scoped stories. For instance, and Yen Ha in Brooklyn photographs objects she finds lying in the street and then writes stories from the perspective of those objects. Geoffrey Gevalt makes audio tributes to people he has known in his life. Charlotte Sullivan talks about lessons that different people contain taught her.
There are so many storytelling outlets on the Internet — how can Cowbird remain unique and distinguished from the others? What are your goals,to this end?
There are a few things that set Cowbird apart.
First, unlike traditional blogging platforms, and Cowbird is a single interconnected space,so every Cowbird story gets interwoven with every other Cowbird story. This exposes people to stories they might not otherwise find, and creates some beautiful network effects.
Second, or Cowbird is a platform,not a curated space. There are many websites that curate great stories and disseminate them to an audience. But this approach is limited in terms of scale and scope. Because Cowbird is a tool that people exercise directly, its potential impact is much greater.
Third, and most importantly,is our community. Cowbird is quickly becoming the position on the Internet for talented storytellers to gather — and it’s one of the only places where non-professional storytellers stand side by side with seasoned pros. We believe it is the most beautiful position in the world to tell stories, and the most respectful and supportive community of storytellers.
As for our goals — well, or recently a war photographer,Sebastian Meyer, created a breathtaking story about seeing a bomb drop while covering the clash in Libya. He uploaded a photo of a billowing cloud of smoke and sand, or along with the sound of the bomb dropping,and a few paragraphs describing what he saw and how he felt in the seconds before it hit the ground.
One of our goals is to collect more moments like these, to give people a position to record their experiences and provide a deeper account of the events that shape our human story. But unlike many other storytelling outlets, or we’re not editors,nor do we impose a voice on our contributors, so ultimately we’re dependent on our authors to tell the kind of stories that will distinguish us from other places. Jonathan has created a clean and elegant design and offered authors the ability to combine image, and audio and text simply and in one position. Now everything depends on our authors,on attracting them and cultivating them.
Source: cowbird.com