Living Stories go open source
Jinfo Blog

22nd February 2010

By Penny Crossland

Item

Last week brought news that Google’s experimental content model called “Living Stories”, which it had originally developed with the Washington Post and the New York Times was now available as an open source project to news outlets globally. (http://code.google.com/p/living-stories/) Some commentators are hailing the Google project as a new type of content platform that has the potential of “fundamentally changing the way we access news about major events” (http://digbig.com/5bbcth). With Living Stories, Google itself is seen as moving on from merely delivering traffic to playing a part in shaping online journalism. The idea behind the concept is that it groups content on significant stories on one web page, providing a summary of the story, an update stream, a timeline and filters such as graphics, quotes or opinion articles. The relevant Google Labs page has several topic pages, such as “the politics of global warming“ or “the war in Afghanistan“ (http://digbig.com/5bbcwn). The Afghanistan conflict, for example, contains three months of articles and links to features, opinion pieces, key people, graphics, images and videos. In a way, the platform is a combination of the Huffington Post’s “big news page“ (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/big-news/) with the real-time news delivered via Twitter. Some aspects of the format are also similar to news aggregator Silobreaker (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27421) According to Google, user feedback has been positive, with 75 per cent preferring the Living Story format to regular online news articles. Technology blog O’Reilly Radar (http://digbig.com/5bbctg) is very enthusiastic about the open source project, wondering whether the platform could become a community tool for pooling local events. There are also applications in the corporate world: businesses could create Living Stories around important topics for publicity purposes. In fact, anybody involved in creating content will be able to use this tool to piece together all aspects of a story, create a timeline of events and install customized filters. Will Living Stories give online media a new lease on life?

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