Jonathan Harris:
Cowbird is a simple tool for telling stories, and a public library of human experience.
We are a small community of storytellers, interested in telling deeper, longer-lasting, more nourishing stories than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web.
His latest project — lovely, as always — and one I’m totally entranced by.
Update: I’m in! So thrilled. This is just the kind of storytelling I love most. I’d be honored if you followed along.
Paul Ford:
I sometimes chat with people in the book- and magazine-publishing industries. They complain to me about the web. They worry about what is being lost. […]
The web, they are a little proud to admit, confuses them. They say: “We gave away all those short stories on our website but it sold no books.” Or: “We built a promo site for our famous author who does the crime novels and it was just a total boondoggle with no traffic.” Or: “The magazine can’t get enough pageviews, even after we hired the famous blogger. Now management wants to make people pay for access.”
“Look,” I say, “maybe you’re doing it wrong.”
“But,” they say, “we tweet.”
That’s when I tell them about the fundamental question of the web.
Craig Mod:
The story begins on March 29, 2010, 10:18pm JST, when a woman sitting in her Brooklyn apartment pushed the first domino. Her $65 pledge kicked off a monthlong fundraising effort that would culminate in a room full of hardcover books, a publishing think tank and the means to begin experimenting with books on the iPad. Oh, and this essay.
With guest Derek Powazek.
Michael Andersen:
Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.
How do you catch up?
Four lessons from the Guardian’s fantastic crowdsourcing experiment.
Paul Graham on web communities.