Joe- So have you gotten email where people have said, "Well this changed my life?"

Derek- I get great email. That is the reason I keep working on the site. And I have never had a bad experience when I have came together with people that I met online.

Joe- Do you have a sense that the participants are of a certain generation?

I get email from high school people that are thanking me for making {fray} such a high school oriented site. And I receive email from baby boomers that say "As a baby boomer, thank you for making a site that's relevant to people like me." Its interesting, you kind of get both here. I think its great, but it's a happy accident.

Joe- It is and it isn't. For the Web generation it is about the participatory attitude. For the baby boomers, the personal story and consciousness-raising are old phenomena.

Derek- Its funny, when I started talking to marketing people about the site they said "Oh, its for the MTV generation." And I said, no, it shouldn't be that limited.

Joe- That's ironic, because I think of the MTV generation as being almost anti-story, that an MTV video is mostly eye-candy.

Derek- I had a professor that described MTV as being the pinnacle of the advertiser's dream, where the product is an advertisement. But MTV has also done some interesting stuff, like having people write-in with story ideas, and then sending them cameras to record stories and they send it back and MTV edits and airs the story. There were some kids that did a story about the banning of skateboards in their community, and they interviewed the sheriff and other people in the community and it was pretty effective.

Joe- What makes a good personal story?

Derek-The first thing that comes to mind is "honest intentions." When I hear someone telling me a story, and I hear them selling me a product, I stop listening. I may be extreme in that opinion, but I don't think people like being manipulated.

When companies use personal stories effectively, I feel like they get through to an audience. I am thinking of the Saturn commercials, where a guy talks about having the ability to pull a chain and stop the assembly line to protect people, and to insure the quality of the car.

As an editor, I think you can never underestimate the power of a good lead. One of the great things about running a Website, you can track the movement of people through the narrative. So you can correlate a relationship between the lead of the story by whether people will follow the links. When the lead is something like, "Like an idiot, I did it again..." vs "In 1991, I had a job at a movie theater and it was really interesting..", you can see how much a difference a good lead will make in leading people into the narrative.

I don't like hearing that you should always have very few words on the web, that is an insult to the readers. You can't put poor writing on the Web. We have some 3000 word stories, although 1000 words seems like a good length.

I like {fray} stories that feel like someone walked up to you in a dimly lit room and looked you straight in the eye and said, "Can I tell you a story" and you say, "Sure, what?" I like stories that feel like private conversations. That said, I try to discourage the kind of writing that sounds to "talky", for example, saying "you see, ....". I want to feel that way, not necessarily read that way.

You can capture some of this feeling graphically. And by how you divide up the pages. Its a very conscious editorial decision about when you break the page and provide a link to the next page, and that can feel like a "pause" in a conversation. It's those little things that make telling stories on the web different than say telling stories in newspapers.