A new up-and-coming social media site focuses on storytelling and sharing life lessons. Branding itself as a mix between Oprah and Wikipedia, Cowbird was created by San-Francisco based artist Jonathan Harris, 32.

Harris told the Toronto Star that his team is trying to create a place that is “a repository for the world’s wisdom, knowledge and experience.” It’s a “library for human experiences” that allows users to write about something they feel passionately about, or a life lesson.

Users have to request an invite to join the site and when invited, they can contribute by uploading a photo accompanied by the story in a text format, with the option of adding audio to the story.

Stories come in a myriad of topics divided grouped together into categories such as sounds, haircuts, sports and sadness. Users can type a requested topic into a searchbar or search through general topics including stories (how we live), people (who we are), timeline (when it was) and places (where we go).

Twelve-thousand users have already joined the site and Harris and his team (made up of Annie Correal, a journalist based in New York and Dave Lauer, a systems engineer in New Jersey) are now looking to create revenue for the site without turning to advertising.

“Facebook and Twitter are mechanisms that channels people’s attention to other things…to links and lists. Cowbird doesn’t share links. It’s a place for creators rather than just a place for lists of cool stuff,” said Harris.

Harris previously created We Feel Fine in 2005, a search-engine type website which focuses on documenting human emotions by searching the blogosphere for phrases about feelings, ie. “I feel,” and saving and displaying them in an artistic way.

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An Update from last week:

In last week’s blog post, I focused on a new trend that some job seekers in the US faced involving their potential employers asking for their social media passwords during the interview process. Since then, Maryland has become the first state to pass legislation to ban this practice.

Maryland social media lawyer Bradley Shear told ABC News, “In a nutshell, it protects employees and employer. It prohibits employees from having to provide access to their password-protected digital content or social media account information.”

Bill 433 passed in the House on Monday, and Minnesota and Illinois have similar legislation currently being written.

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