"I like "minutiae of everyday life" more than @cowbird does. I suspect ephemera may often outlast more consciously crafted stories. #pda12"

[Jonathan Harris tells three stories about his fourth grade teacher, Baz

1. What make a great teacher?
2. How to engage your audience
3. On death]

"Fast and agile like a bird, slow and ruminant like a cow. Jonathan Harris says his new project is designed to be a narrative alternative to the data mayhem that fills the web.

Unlike his much-lauded past project, We Feel Fine, Harris says Cowbird is not about cataloguing diverse, fragmentary statements. He wants it to be a place where people can go deeply into the "ecstatic truth" of human life."

Harris: "I think that’s something stories can do—prepare their way of finding meaning in this madness and bringing some order to the chaos.<br />
<br />
…creating a space that’s more about slowing down and contemplating and being introspective is a prerequisite for getting people to tell stories that have impact.<br />
<br />
…Cow Bird is basically a storytelling platform that people can use to tell stories online using photos, sound maps, timelines, videos, and casts of characters. It’s geared towards long-form narrative…when many different people tell stories, the system automatically finds connections between them and weaves them together into a kind of meta-story…The platform automatically analyzes all the text in your memory, figures out your cast of characters, and connects it to previous stories.<br />
<br />
…one of the pieces of this system I’ve been building is that to tell the story you have to dedicate it to somebody, which creates a gift economy of stories."