Workin’ It Today we celebrate storytelling legend Studs Terkel. With his seminal 1974 book Working, Studs gathered stories from over 130 Americans in different professions, exploring new and old ways of working. As a birthday gift to Studs, who would have turned 100 today, we just launched our Working Saga. This saga includes more than 400 stories - with beautiful images - from around the world.  Like Studs’s ground-breaking book, this collection offers a glimpse at people working in many different places—in offices, airplanes, hotels, factories and call centers. Our saga also includes portraits of people who have kept the skilled trades alive, a cheese-maker and a street performer.  With this globally crowd-sourced call to action, we’ve explored how people work today, and how that work shapes who they are. Explore the entire saga here. Thanks to all of you, we did Studs proud. Here are some gems that totally dismantle our conceptions of the ole 9-5: “If you can fix soles, you can save lives.” by Christian Payne “Why I quit my job.” by Dave Lauer “The Artist” by Wei Yuet Wong P.S. Also, we’re not the only ones crowd-sourcing stories for the Studs Terkel Centenary! The Center for Digital Storytelling (US) and the Museu da Pessoa/Museum of the Person (Brazil) celebrate May 16, the 5th Annual International Day for Sharing Life Stories.
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Workin’ It

Today we celebrate storytelling legend Studs Terkel. With his seminal 1974 book Working, Studs gathered stories from over 130 Americans in different professions, exploring new and old ways of working.

As a birthday gift to Studs, who would have turned 100 today, we just launched our Working Saga.

This saga includes more than 400 stories - with beautiful images - from around the world.  Like Studs’s ground-breaking book, this collection offers a glimpse at people working in many different places—in offices, airplanes, hotels, factories and call centers. Our saga also includes portraits of people who have kept the skilled trades alive, a cheese-maker and a street performer.  With this globally crowd-sourced call to action, we’ve explored how people work today, and how that work shapes who they are. Explore the entire saga here.

Thanks to all of you, we did Studs proud. Here are some gems that totally dismantle our conceptions of the ole 9-5:

“If you can fix soles, you can save lives.” by Christian Payne

“Why I quit my job.” by Dave Lauer

“The Artist” by Wei Yuet Wong

P.S. Also, we’re not the only ones crowd-sourcing stories for the Studs Terkel Centenary! The Center for Digital Storytelling (US) and the Museu da Pessoa/Museum of the Person (Brazil) celebrate May 16, the 5th Annual International Day for Sharing Life Stories.

Handpicked: “Playground” California has had its share of budget cuts in the past year, especially in the realm of education. This affected teachers, schools, after school programs and so much more, but have you ever wondered how it affected the soundtrack to your day? Daily story author Celine noticed that the street outside her friend’s window had gone silent. Her friend lived next door to a school’s playground and when she could no longer hear the sounds of children’s laughter or the bounce of a dodge ball, Celine wondered if the students had vanished. Celine, photographer, visual thinker, and self-described geek, cleverly mixes short electronic beats or short snippets with powerful imagery to share her insights on “days in the jungle of history.”  While living in San Francisco, Celine has also taken unusual portraits of the city’s characters.
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Handpicked: “Playground”

California has had its share of budget cuts in the past year, especially in the realm of education. This affected teachers, schools, after school programs and so much more, but have you ever wondered how it affected the soundtrack to your day?

Daily story author Celine noticed that the street outside her friend’s window had gone silent. Her friend lived next door to a school’s playground and when she could no longer hear the sounds of children’s laughter or the bounce of a dodge ball, Celine wondered if the students had vanished.

Celine, photographer, visual thinker, and self-described geek, cleverly mixes short electronic beats or short snippets with powerful imagery to share her insights on “days in the jungle of history.”  While living in San Francisco, Celine has also taken unusual portraits of the city’s characters.

Handpicked: “He didn’t Mean to Die” In this daily story, author Sara Curtis visits her grandmother at a rest home. Nana Curtis has given up talking on the phone, so Sara asks her to say something into an audio recorder, so she can feel close to her when she’s far away. Her grandmother delivers an unexpectedly powerful message. Sara - a storyteller who lives in San Francisco - tells stories that often have this element of surprise. Sometimes it’s a strange face appearing amid traffic, other times it’s a splash of color on the sidewalk.
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Handpicked: “He didn’t Mean to Die”

In this daily story, author Sara Curtis visits her grandmother at a rest home. Nana Curtis has given up talking on the phone, so Sara asks her to say something into an audio recorder, so she can feel close to her when she’s far away. Her grandmother delivers an unexpectedly powerful message. Sara - a storyteller who lives in San Francisco - tells stories that often have this element of surprise. Sometimes it’s a strange face appearing amid traffic, other times it’s a splash of color on the sidewalk.

Handpicked: “one night stand” Zach, the author of Sunday’s daily story, writes poems about everyday life on Cowbird. He’s written about waiting at a bus station, listening to music, running in to a one night stand. Without exception, his stories are illustrated with blocks of color like this one. Zach doesn’t describe himself as a poet. He says he is “a janitor and a noticer.” In his characteristic lowercase, Zach writes: “i am a janitor at a hospital. i enjoy playing racquetball, making crafts, riding my bike, watching movies, traveling, reading, and everything about music. sharing written things freaks me out.” Oops! Well, the Cowbird community has enjoyed Zach’s written things. In fact, an unusual number of poems cropped up on Cowbird in the 24 hours after we chose his story, including this one. 
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Handpicked: “one night stand”

Zach, the author of Sunday’s daily story, writes poems about everyday life on Cowbird. He’s written about waiting at a bus station, listening to music, running in to a one night stand. Without exception, his stories are illustrated with blocks of color like this one.

Zach doesn’t describe himself as a poet. He says he is “a janitor and a noticer.” In his characteristic lowercase, Zach writes: “i am a janitor at a hospital. i enjoy playing racquetball, making crafts, riding my bike, watching movies, traveling, reading, and everything about music. sharing written things freaks me out.” Oops! Well, the Cowbird community has enjoyed Zach’s written things. In fact, an unusual number of poems cropped up on Cowbird in the 24 hours after we chose his story, including this one. 

Handpicked: “Emily to the Rescue”  When daily story author Adriana Regalado saw two little eyes peeking out from beneath a pile of leaves, she didn’t think twice before picking them up. In her hand was the hummingbird that would come to be known as Emily.  In this and other stories we circulated today, people bear witness to the powerful appearance of an animal - or animals - in their lives. One woman must save a pot of bees. Another, two feisty baby hedgehogs. Soon we plan to interview our resident animal expert, Dave Huth, about his playful devotion to the animal kingdom. Check out his awe-inspiring audio collection of animal stories, and send questions for Dave to annie@cowbird.com.
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Handpicked: “Emily to the Rescue” 

When daily story author Adriana Regalado saw two little eyes peeking out from beneath a pile of leaves, she didn’t think twice before picking them up. In her hand was the hummingbird that would come to be known as Emily. 

In this and other stories we circulated today, people bear witness to the powerful appearance of an animal - or animals - in their lives. One woman must save a pot of bees. Another, two feisty baby hedgehogs.

Soon we plan to interview our resident animal expert, Dave Huth, about his playful devotion to the animal kingdom. Check out his awe-inspiring audio collection of animal stories, and send questions for Dave to annie@cowbird.com.

Handpicked: “Beer Bottle” In this daily story, Yen Ha describes a night on the town from the beer bottle’s point of view. Yen has taken the same imaginative approach to writing about more than a dozen objects spotted on the streets of Manhattan. In each case, she takes a photo of the item lying on the ground, usually on the sidewalk, which lends the series a certain visual consistency. I asked Yen about her project: “I’m an architect so to me this is a very urban project, it’s about the impact we have on the city when we use and unthinkingly discard things and what that means to the life of our cities. Since I started this series, I can’t stop noticing things on the street and thinking about how they got there! Everything has a story and I feel like they are all clamoring to be heard. In a way we thought of it as a public awareness campaign, a way of telling personal stories about inanimate objects to encourage people to notice the effects their actions have on our environment.” This is working — at least on Cowbird. Yen’s trash series has inspired at least one author to tell the story from the point of view of a discarded item, namely, a little blue pill. 
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Handpicked: “Beer Bottle”

In this daily story, Yen Ha describes a night on the town from the beer bottle’s point of view. Yen has taken the same imaginative approach to writing about more than a dozen objects spotted on the streets of Manhattan. In each case, she takes a photo of the item lying on the ground, usually on the sidewalk, which lends the series a certain visual consistency. I asked Yen about her project:

“I’m an architect so to me this is a very urban project, it’s about the impact we have on the city when we use and unthinkingly discard things and what that means to the life of our cities. Since I started this series, I can’t stop noticing things on the street and thinking about how they got there! Everything has a story and I feel like they are all clamoring to be heard. In a way we thought of it as a public awareness campaign, a way of telling personal stories about inanimate objects to encourage people to notice the effects their actions have on our environment.”

This is working — at least on Cowbird. Yen’s trash series has inspired at least one author to tell the story from the point of view of a discarded item, namely, a little blue pill. 

Handpicked: “Mad Men”  On a rainy night in London, Leilani Holmes had an interesting experience: her bus was stopped by a man — who was repeatedly head-butting it. “What made him so senselessly aggressive toward a big red bus I can only surmise,” Leilani writes in today’s daily story. This was framed as a personal reflection, not reportage, but like most of Leilani’s 99 (!) stories to date, it offered a glimpse at life on the streets of London today. Leilani describes herself as an actor, screenwriter, filmmaker, and teadrinker. She is also a walker and a watcher. Stories like this one - and “A Very Tall Man” and “Barren Days” - are good examples of how text can change the way we see a city scene.
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Handpicked: “Mad Men” 

On a rainy night in London, Leilani Holmes had an interesting experience: her bus was stopped by a man — who was repeatedly head-butting it. “What made him so senselessly aggressive toward a big red bus I can only surmise,” Leilani writes in today’s daily story.

This was framed as a personal reflection, not reportage, but like most of Leilani’s 99 (!) stories to date, it offered a glimpse at life on the streets of London today. Leilani describes herself as an actor, screenwriter, filmmaker, and teadrinker. She is also a walker and a watcher. Stories like this one - and “A Very Tall Man” and “Barren Days” - are good examples of how text can change the way we see a city scene.

Handpicked: “Hearts and Minds”   Charles Eckert is a photojournalist based in New York. His stories capture the people we don’t see when we turn on the news, like the Afghan soldier in this story, who created a makeshift radio station in his barracks using just an antenna, a cellphone and a microphone.  Charles discovered this story while embedded with an American tactical training team in Southern Afghanistan in 2008. The team was training Afghan soldiers to use new M16s when Charles first noticed Miya Gul. “One of these guys was so proud of his new rifle, he taped his photo to it,” Charles told me. “One of the American trainers told me, ‘Not only is he a great shot, but he started his own radio station.’ These guys were being fired at from the next town over, so he decided to try to reach them and get them to stop. There was a homemade antenna sticking out of their barracks. I went in and asked Miya Gul if the radio station was still operational — and he started playing music from a cell phone. He seemed really smart. He thought one way to reach people was playing music, because it had been banned [under the Taliban].”
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Handpicked: “Hearts and Minds”  

Charles Eckert is a photojournalist based in New York. His stories capture the people we don’t see when we turn on the news, like the Afghan soldier in this story, who created a makeshift radio station in his barracks using just an antenna, a cellphone and a microphone. 

Charles discovered this story while embedded with an American tactical training team in Southern Afghanistan in 2008. The team was training Afghan soldiers to use new M16s when Charles first noticed Miya Gul. “One of these guys was so proud of his new rifle, he taped his photo to it,” Charles told me.

“One of the American trainers told me, ‘Not only is he a great shot, but he started his own radio station.’ These guys were being fired at from the next town over, so he decided to try to reach them and get them to stop. There was a homemade antenna sticking out of their barracks. I went in and asked Miya Gul if the radio station was still operational — and he started playing music from a cell phone. He seemed really smart. He thought one way to reach people was playing music, because it had been banned [under the Taliban].”

Love Notes For two weeks before the First Loves Saga launched on Valentine’s Day, I stayed up late at night reading your love stories. Without number crunching, I can report a few trends.  Some are not very surprising. Around a fifth of the 390 stories posted to date feature photos or drawings of couples. A good number of first loves took place in high school and college. And hearts are all over this saga. Painted, carved, photo-shopped, shaped between two hands – you can’t escape them. Other popular images are flowers, flames, birds, and beaches. Click on any of these images, though, and you’re likely to get something different than you expected. See that nice photo of a nesting bird? It’s a story about divorce. And that luscious purple blossom? It’s about not having a first love. Romantic love can be complicated, and possibly as a result, many authors have dedicated their stories to tried and true loves: their children, fathers, mothers, and dogs. Another surprise is that only two authors have admitted that their first love began on the Internet. In a generation, that may change. For now, people still remember meeting the old-fashioned way —  by chance: at a kibbutz, a music store, a convention center, backstage at a theatre, even at a cemetery. In love, as in storytelling, beginnings are important.   If you pick up on a trend in the saga that you’d like to share, email me at annie@cowbird.com and I’ll post it here. If you want to join Cowbird and tell your own first love story, request an invite!
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Love Notes

For two weeks before the First Loves Saga launched on Valentine’s Day, I stayed up late at night reading your love stories. Without number crunching, I can report a few trends. 

Some are not very surprising. Around a fifth of the 390 stories posted to date feature photos or drawings of couples. A good number of first loves took place in high school and college. And hearts are all over this saga. Painted, carved, photo-shopped, shaped between two hands – you can’t escape them. Other popular images are flowers, flames, birds, and beaches.

Click on any of these images, though, and you’re likely to get something different than you expected. See that nice photo of a nesting bird? It’s a story about divorce. And that luscious purple blossom? It’s about not having a first love. Romantic love can be complicated, and possibly as a result, many authors have dedicated their stories to tried and true loves: their children, fathers, mothers, and dogs.

Another surprise is that only two authors have admitted that their first love began on the Internet. In a generation, that may change. For now, people still remember meeting the old-fashioned way —  by chance: at a kibbutz, a music store, a convention center, backstage at a theatre, even at a cemetery. In love, as in storytelling, beginnings are important.  

If you pick up on a trend in the saga that you’d like to share, email me at annie@cowbird.com and I’ll post it here. If you want to join Cowbird and tell your own first love story, request an invite!

Cowbird, Inc., A Love StoryToday, Valentine’s Day, 2012, marks two important milestones for Cowbird.First, we are announcing our second saga, First Loves, consisting of stories from people all over the world about the first person with whom they fell in love. It is a beautiful saga already, filled with hundreds of heart-stopping stories — like Aaron Huey’s impromptu wedding on a Russian tank hours after facing death by the Taliban; Annie Atkins’ clinical diagnosis of heartbreak; Whitney Jones’ rhythmic recollection of 28 firsts; and my own decision to break a long silence with my Dad. Take your time, have a look, see what you feel, and add your own story of first love.Second, today we are creating a company to solidify the little labor of love known as Cowbird. Since launching Cowbird two months ago, the response has been tremendous, and it’s quickly become more work than I can do alone. My dear friend, Annie Correal, has joined Cowbird as our full-time Community Manager, and Dave Lauer has been a hero in keeping our servers alive. We need to pay these folks for their excellent work, and there are many beautiful things that we want to build, for which we’ll need some resources. So we’re planning to raise a small amount of money over the next few months to help propel Cowbird into the future. We’ll continue to take a slow and thoughtful approach to everything we do, but there will be some exciting additions coming soon.I never thought I would find myself in the position of starting a company, but it seems to be the path that makes the most sense. We considered keeping Cowbird as an art project, but that would limit our ability to grow and evolve. We considered starting a non-profit, but the prospect of constant fundraising and bureaucratic red tape felt like a costly distraction. Starting a company felt like the most nimble and flexible approach. But don’t worry, we’re going to be a nice company!We still have the same threefold mission: to build a space for a longer-lasting kind of self-expression than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web; to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events; and 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.In the long-term, we believe it’s crucial that Cowbird be self-sustaining financially. We’re committed to keeping Cowbird free of advertising forever, but we have some other interesting ideas around building a creative economy (without selling your personal information), which we’ll introduce at some point down the line, when the time is right.We’re not sure where this path will lead, but we’re incredibly excited for the journey. In the words of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, “There are thousands of paths. They all lead nowhere. You must ask yourself one question: ‘Does this path have a heart?’ If it does, the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use.”Here’s to a path with a heart,Jonathan
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Cowbird, Inc., A Love Story

Today, Valentine’s Day, 2012, marks two important milestones for Cowbird.

First, we are announcing our second saga, First Loves, consisting of stories from people all over the world about the first person with whom they fell in love. It is a beautiful saga already, filled with hundreds of heart-stopping stories — like Aaron Huey’s impromptu wedding on a Russian tank hours after facing death by the Taliban; Annie Atkins’ clinical diagnosis of heartbreak; Whitney Jones’ rhythmic recollection of 28 firsts; and my own decision to break a long silence with my Dad. Take your time, have a look, see what you feel, and add your own story of first love.

Second, today we are creating a company to solidify the little labor of love known as Cowbird. Since launching Cowbird two months ago, the response has been tremendous, and it’s quickly become more work than I can do alone. My dear friend, Annie Correal, has joined Cowbird as our full-time Community Manager, and Dave Lauer has been a hero in keeping our servers alive. We need to pay these folks for their excellent work, and there are many beautiful things that we want to build, for which we’ll need some resources. So we’re planning to raise a small amount of money over the next few months to help propel Cowbird into the future. We’ll continue to take a slow and thoughtful approach to everything we do, but there will be some exciting additions coming soon.

I never thought I would find myself in the position of starting a company, but it seems to be the path that makes the most sense. We considered keeping Cowbird as an art project, but that would limit our ability to grow and evolve. We considered starting a non-profit, but the prospect of constant fundraising and bureaucratic red tape felt like a costly distraction. Starting a company felt like the most nimble and flexible approach. But don’t worry, we’re going to be a nice company!

We still have the same threefold mission: to build a space for a longer-lasting kind of self-expression than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web; to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events; and 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.

In the long-term, we believe it’s crucial that Cowbird be self-sustaining financially. We’re committed to keeping Cowbird free of advertising forever, but we have some other interesting ideas around building a creative economy (without selling your personal information), which we’ll introduce at some point down the line, when the time is right.

We’re not sure where this path will lead, but we’re incredibly excited for the journey. In the words of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan, “There are thousands of paths. They all lead nowhere. You must ask yourself one question: ‘Does this path have a heart?’ If it does, the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use.”

Here’s to a path with a heart,

Jonathan