CowBird - Putting the Feeling Back in to Social Media

Working in a place like ours, from producers to designers, you are dealing with stories everyday and trying to communicate them in the best way possible through video, motion graphics and scripting. Throughout my day I'll always look to Vimeo to see how other people are telling their digital stories too, whether personal or professional.

The lasting effect of an engaging narrative can be rare but is always one that I want to share with others, so you can imagine my delight when I came across this little gem - CowBird.com
A site dedicated to very short personal stories and not just one off statuses. There's a different lead topic everyday and anyone can contribute. Mostly they are remarkably compelling and heartfelt given their length and the writer's anonymity.

The brains behind the site, Jonathan Harris, talks about his motivation to set up CowBird.
He's got a pretty interesting back-story too which he doesn't mind sharing.

Harris states that the idea came about on his 30^th Birthday. He began running an experimental project, posting photos he thought were interesting to his personal site, number27.org, and adding an accompanying short story about each one. This small project then took flight and became CowBird.

Harris is also the designer behind 'We Feel Fine' which scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling", the idea being that in recent years, with the boom of social contribution sites such as Twitter and Facebook, people are posting increasingly distanced and unemotional content to the web. 'We Feel Fine', and now Cowbird, attempts to return to the emotional core of online social diaries and the digital footprints that we leave.

It's an incredibly beautiful site simply on a stylistic level but I urge you to check it out for some soul baring snippets.