Interviewer- How did {fray} come about?

Derek- {fray} came about two years ago. In 1996, I was working at Hotwired. From the first day I laid eyes on the Web, the thing that impressed me was how total strangers could meet and connect with each other based on common experience and common ideology as opposed to where they happened to live.

And I just didn't see that being tapped anywhere. I have motion video already on my TV, and real time news updates which I have on my radio, the Web saying "the web was being used for things is wasn't good at.

Like the birth of many things, {fray} was built out of frustration. I wanted to make a place that was designed to let people tell their stories to an audience. Then the audience would turn around and tell their stories back to them. That is what I saw as the real power of the Web that nobody was doing.

So I started {fray} and solicited stories from people I knew. At this point the stories are from people I have never even met, they are solicited from people through the web site. We have a mailing list of around 3750 people who I alert when a new story goes up. A new story goes up about every three weeks. There are all individually designed by me, that's my contribution. Each story ends with a question, which prompts to a very linear posting forum where users recount stories from their lives that are analogous to stories they just read.

All the stories are first person. All the stories are true. I think fiction is a rare and wonderful thing, but it is not the focus of this site.

From the outset I knew I wanted true personal stories.

This is what moves me, and if it moves me its probably what moves other people. I wanted to give people the opportunity to walk a mile in someone else's shoes, yet I always feel that I am being cheated if those shoes to turn out to be fake.
I have a background in photojournalism in college. I took many journalism writing classes and art photography classes, and that is why I have this huge schism in what moves me, one is very literal and factual and the other is more artistic. I have to do both and I still want to do both. So those were my goals.