The Never-Ending Story

In 2006, Jonathan Harris and a colleague launched We Feel Fine, a project that took the Web's emotional pulse by culling personal data from blogs. It was the first of several groundbreaking websites that Harris helped to create, and the project attracted widespread attention. In the following years, however, Harris began to feel like a voyeur. Determined to find a more open, transparent way to chart shared human experiences, he retreated into solitude, altered his approach, and developed a new digital storytelling platform called Cow Bird. The platform, which recently launched, encourages people to tell long-form stories online using photos, sound maps, timelines, videos, and casts of characters. It then spins a larger "meta" tale from their commonalities. With Cow Bird, Harris aims to revive letter writing in the digital era-providing the Internet generation with a deeper, more reciprocal means of communication than shouting into a disconnected social media void.

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