Cowbird: An Online Audio Storytelling Community

If you've ever listened to an episode of This American Life and thought, I could do that (or maybe, more realistically, I wish I could do that) then you might just find a home at Cowbird, an online community of storytellers. Users record stories based on their personal experiences and share them with their fellow Cowbird urders and the wider Internet community.  

"Cowbird is a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web...The storytelling format we're trying to coalesce around is a single photograph accompanied by an audio or written vignette, the more personal and authentic the better." 

You don't have to be a user to listen in, but if you want to get the most out of the experience you can request an invitation and start "loving" stories (way better than Facebook's "Like") and discovering authors you admire. When you join someone's audience you get updates when they record a new story. When you're ready, you can begin your own audio-visual diary. 

"Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance."

Find out more and listen to a few stories to undoubtedly get inspired.

-- Perrin Drumm