Today, Google Labs, the Washington Post, and the New York Times launched an experimental service called Living Stories that does some interesting things to present news stories in a way that makes them more webby (i.e., content that is designed to be “of the web” instead of just “on the web.”) It offers these features:
- Each news topic gets its own URL: health reform, climate change, Afghanistan, etc. Google explains that this allows you to “quickly navigate between news articles, opinion pieces and features without long waits for pages to load.”
- Each topic has a summary at the top and sections that will show you the latest news, key events, who the players are, images, videos, etc.
- If you create a Google Account (if you’ve got a Gmail account or a Google Calendar or a Blogger login, then you have a Google Account already) and use that to log in to the Living Stories page, then the service will remember what stories you’ve already seen on a given news topic and will highlight any new ones that have been added since you last visited. Another way to be notified of new developments for a particular topic is to set up an email alert or subscribe to an RSS feed.
This might be a useful complement to databases like Facts on File and CQ Researcher, particularly for students who are trying to get background information on a developing news story.
Additional coverage of this project:
Kirkpatrick, Marshall. “Beyond the Web Page: Google, NY Times, and Washington Post Launch News Experiment. ReadWriteWeb, 8 December 2009. Web.
Singh, Neha and Josh Cohen. “Exploring a New, More Dynamic Way of Reading News with Living Stories.” Official Google Blog, 8 December 2009. Web.