The StoryBog is a website for people who like storytelling.

There are lots of resources for spoken-word storytellers on the web, as well as lots of stories. But there don't seem to be many sites making it easy for people to share stories.

The purpose of this site is exactly that: to allow anyone with access to a computer and a microphone to tell a story and share their telling of it with other people, and to allow anyone with access to a computer with speakers to be able to hear to that story.

This is a work in progress.

The site is an experiment. I don't know whether the internet is compatible with spoken storytelling on anything above a purely administrative level. If it is, I don't know how the two are best combined. Therefore I don't have an over-arching vision for the site, or a set of "killer features" that I intend to roll out. What I want is to make this site available to the world, see how it's used, see who (if anyone) uses it, and see what I can add to it to make it better

Which is where you come in.

Explore the site, experiment with it (please don't actively try to break it), devise, record and upload stories to your heart's content, and let me know what you think.

The first step is to make a recording of your story, if you don't have one already. Many computers have a built-in microphone, or come bundled with one. If you don't have one, one of your friends will. Use this in conjunction with your favourite recording software to record your story and save it as an mp3 (for Windows users I recommend the awesome and free Wavosaur, which lets you export recordings as mp3s quickly and easily).

Don't worry about recording the perfect take.

There's something a bit sterile about a recording that's too perfect, so don't spend hours re-recording and editing the life out of your story. That's not to say that you shouldn't be aiming for clarity and good tone - see this BBC article on mic technique for some tips.

Once you've got a recording you're happy with, and saved it as an mp3, you're ready to put it onto the site. Click the upload button, check that you agree with the terms of use, and select the file you want to upload. If all goes well you should, after a little loading, be redirected to a page where you can fill in some details about the story - its title and any information about it you want to share. You can also add to your story to make it easier for other people to find it. So, for example, if you had a horror story about Austrian dentists, you could put "horror, Austria, dentistry" in the tag field, and anyone searching for those words on the site would find your story.

When you have put all the information you want it, check the published box and click "Update". Remember you can change this information at any time, and un-publish a story at any time.

A story won't be visible to other users unless it's both published and approved. Hopefully there's nothing sinister about the approval process. It's simply a check by a site admin that the uploaded story isn't a blatant copyright violation. All being well your story will be approved within 24 hours of you opting to publish it, at which point it'll be visible and audible to the whole world.

Every time someone listens to a story, the "listens" counter goes up by one. Likewise every time someone downloads a story, the "downloads" counter goes up. Finally, all logged-in users have a chance to "like" any story on the site, and the total number of "likes" is recorded (note that if you change your mind you can always "unlike" something you previously "liked").

What's the significance of these statistics? Not much, beyond determining which stories are featured in the rankings lists on the left hand side of the screen. These vaguely keep track of what's hot and what's generally popular, but it's not worth getting too competitive over.

You can browse, listen to and download stories without registering. However, to "like" stories, comment on them, or upload your own, you must register.

Registration is a two-step process. First, click on the "Register" button and fill in the form. You can see an explanation of the different fields in the form by clicking on the relevant help button (a white 'i' in a green circle).

Once the form is submitted you'll be sent an email with a link that you must follow (click on it or copy and paste into your browser address bar). This will confirm your account and log you in, completing the registration process.

If you're not logged in you may at certain points be presented with a red box that asks you to type some distorted words into a box. This is a captcha, provided by reCAPTCHA, and is designed to demonstrate that you're human.

Spammers and hackers often create automated programs whose job it is to find forms on websites and repetitively fill them in, as part of their creators' evil schemes. To counter these it is common to use a captcha, which sets a task that's easy for humans but hard for machines.

reCAPTCHA offers the added bonus that in completing its captchas you are helping to digitize books. Some of the words it displays come from old newspapers and books that are being digitized (read by computer programs and stored as text files to preserve them). They are words that the digitizing program has problems recognising, so by typing them for it you are helping to preserve in perpetuity the original texts they come from.

Browsing using tags

Every story uploaded to the site can have several "tags" associated with it. A tag is simply a word or phrase that in some way relates to the story's content. By themselves they are nothing more than a description of the story, but collectively they allow users to explore similar stories and view what themes or attributes are popular among stories on the site.

When viewing a story you can click on any of its tags to be shown a list of all stories that have that tag. You can also click the Browse button at the top to be shown a list of the most popular tags, and the number of stories tagged with each. Clicking on any of these displays a list of the relevant stories.

Searching

Clicking on the Search button brings down the search form. Enter one or more words and you will be shown and stories or users that match all the words you've entered. A story is considered a match if the title, info and author name fields contain all the words you've entered. A user is a match if their name and info together contain all the words entered.

You will also be shown a list of tags that match any of the words you've entered.

If you have any difficulty registering, logging in, uploading, downloading or doing anything else on this site, use the contact form to let me know, and I'll see what I can do.

Use the contact form and let me know!

This is a tricky one. I don't want to set myself up as a censor, but this site is designed to share spoken stories, and I want to make sure that's respected. So here's a general guideline to what will happen to non-standard uploads:

Non-fiction

Fine by me.

Poems and plays

Well, it's not quite playing the game, but I'll allow it, provided it's got some sort of narrative content and you're the copyright holder.

Songs

Hmm. Heavily narrative-led songs are probably ok, but why not just use MySpace?

Sound effects, samples or instrumental music

Not impressed. Why not try the excellent Freesound Project?

Non-audio content

Not a chance. In fact, you'll probably find it's impossible to upload it in the first place. But if somehow you do manage it, don't be surprised if it's deleted.