About

What is Cowbird?

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.

Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are themes and events that touch millions of lives and shape the human story.

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.

What can I use Cowbird to do?

Keep a gorgeous diary of your life.

Weave together a stunning self-portrait, story by story, forming an interactive photo-mosaic of your life.

Experience incredible stories by some of the world's finest storytellers.

On Cowbird, you will find some of the most heartfelt, heartbreaking, heartstopping stories anywhere. We strive to tell stories that will still resonate in 100 years.

Present your stories in the most beautiful storytelling environment on the Web.

Cowbird was designed to make stories look their best, with stunning full-screen photos, clean typography, intelligent infographics, hand-drawn iconography, and a non-distracting environment that respects every story.

Preserve your stories in the world's first public library of human experience.

Stories help us not to forget, and not to be forgotten. Add your stories to the library so they won't be forgotten, and so that other people, now and many years from now, may learn from your experience.

Collaborate with a global network of storytellers to chronicle humanity's sagas.

As the mainstream media becomes increasingly out of touch with our decentralized, quickly changing, networked reality, help us find a more resonant way of understanding our world and telling its stories.

Witness the simple human moments behind major news events.

When we tell personal stories, we humanize the news, give shape to amorphous events, and create an experiential record of history as it unfolds.

Author stories with our simple and efficient story editor.

Add photos, audio, subtitles, characters, tags, dates, locations, dedications, and more, and shape your stories into exactly what you want them to be.

Create interactive audio stories with clickable subtitles.

Let viewers efficiently navigate your audio stories using interactive subtitles, which play automatically over the photograph, using a translucent overlay.

Include characters in your stories.

Create characters for your friends, family, and other folks who appear in your life, and Cowbird will automatically build your cast of characters.

Dedicate your stories to people you love.

Give your Mom a story for Mother's Day. Give your girlfriend a story for her birthday. Help us create a gift economy of stories, like the days when people sent each other letters.

Discover the connections between your life and the lives of others.

Cowbird automatically finds similarities and connections between your stories and the stories of others, showing people living similar lives.

Browse a timeline of your life.

Add dates to your stories, and Cowbird will create an interactive timeline of your life, for every year, month, hour, and minute for which you have stories.

See a map of your life.

Add locations to your stories and Cowbird will automatically create an interactive map of your life, for every country, region, and city in the world..

Explore an index of themes.

Embrace your inner bookworm and browse our thematic index, showing the overall volume of different words in the library using sparkline infographics.

Uncover hidden ways to explore.

Cowbird has many hidden features, flourishes, and other little easter eggs waiting to be discovered — have fun exploring!

Love your favorite stories to help them rise up through the ecosystem.

Click the heart button on any story to love it, which saves it in your diary so you can find it later, and also helps that story grow in popularity on Cowbird.

Join the audiences of authors you admire to follow their stories.

Click the butterfly button on any Cowbird story to join its author's audience, and you'll be able to receive all their new stories directly by email.

Customize your diary.

Choose your favorite address, color palette, timezone, and more, to make your diary feel like home.

Choose copyright settings that feel right for you with our simple license chooser.

Everyone has different thoughts about copyright, so we let you decide which license makes the most sense for you. You always maintain full control of your stories.

Share your stories by email, and on all your favorite social networks.

Click the "Share" button on any story to open our versatile sharing panel, and start spreading word about the wonderful stories you discover.

Follow us on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook to get all our latest news.

We'll keep you up to date with useful new features, cool events, beautiful stories, and many other interesting things we find in the world.

Cherish a deeper, longer-lasting kind of storytelling than you're likely to find anywhere else on the Web.

The heart and soul of Cowbird is the heart and soul that every Cowbird author puts into their stories. Spend a little time here, and you'll start to see why this place is so special, and why people love it so much.