Joe- Last year at the Digital Storytelling festival last year you spoke about an approach to web design for the {fray} that was inspired by your experience as a folk singer, or folk songs, could you talk about that?

Derek- My background in storytelling was first and foremost in songwriting. Songwriting stuck into my brain, and either I twisted that into my work on the Web, or they really do have some things in common. Hearing songs, singing and writing songs, allowed me to know the world through different points of view. That understanding was valuable to me.

So what I try to do in designing different stories for {fray} is mirror the songwriting process. I design pages with the chorus-verse-chorus-verse design treatment where the first page is the introduction to the story, its like a verse. The second page is a pull quote that looks visually different, not as much text, it goes wham and has one thought, which is like a chorus. And then it goes back to the verse and then back to the chorus.

The connection is that at the end of a good song, you are singing along. So by the end of a {fray} story, you are posting your thoughts.
That's the analogy, it lets you sing along with the author, except it's your turn.

I see them as really similar. I may be just suffering from synesthesia. But the way you construct a song to pull a heartstring, to tap into the things which a listener relate's, is similar to a kind of story design. That's why we relate to love songs, like when an old blues singer talks about "my baby done me wrong" there is not a person in the world that wouldn't go, "Yeah, I know how that feels."

Well, that's what I try to do with {fray} stories, to provide something visual that taps into that feeling. To have their stories be unique enough that they are personal experiences, but still be on topics that people can go, "yeah, I can relate to that."

The one that is up now is about a person's last night with a friend, and it wasn't a girlfriend, it wasn't a lover... He was going to move to the East Coast and he had this friend who said, "No, you're not going to go until I have one last night with you." So they go to a bar, they talk, and they go back to his house, and they wind up slow dancing and she gives him a kiss and the shoves him out the door and says, "Now you have to go." And he goes to his car and sits and thinks about how transitory friendship is and then he drives away. So the question is, "Who have you left?" Tell a story about when you have been forced to leave a friend." So it's a very specific story from someone's life, but it ends with a general question to get people to tell their stories.

Joe-When you are acting as editor are you looking for stories that pose that question, or can any story be phrased in a follow-up question?

Derek- I am definitely looking for stories that tap into that universal feeling and some stories do it easier than others. But when we ran a story on Burning Man, there was really only one question, "Tell us what you did at Burning Man." So if you didn't go to Burning Man, you didn't have a lot to say. And that 's okay when I feel like there are enough people to warrant it.

But an example of a good specific question was at the time of the 96 elections. I had voted for Clinton and felt ambivalent, so I put up a story that said that. In the final question, I said. "Did you vote, how did you vote, and how did you feel about it" and it exploded, there were hundreds of people that posted. It limited it to Americans and people that voted, but it was current enough and broad enough that became a great posting forum.