Living Stories

Last updated September 24, 2021

Living Stories is a project developed by Google along with collaboration from The New York Times and The Washington Post for presenting news that started from December 2009 - February 2010.^[1] The stories that ran are still available on the living stories website but are not being currently updated. The purpose behind the project was an attempt to experiment by breaking from a traditional interface of just one article about one story by innovatively combining multiple articles about a "living story" that is ongoing and that continues to develop while implementing them under a unique URL interface.

Concept

The Living Stories interface allowed readers to view multiple threads of the same story, similar to an RSS feed, a summary of the story, a timeline, and more features all while allowing the reader to view updated information while filtering or highlighting what the reader has already read about.^[2] According to Google, Living Stories was preferred over reading traditional news formats by 75% of the people surveyed.^[3]

Release as open source

After the initial experimental period, Google released it to the public on February 17, 2010, as an open source code.^[3] According to Neha Singh, software engineer for Google, "Open sourcing the code was the logical next stage of the experiment and was always planned. From the beginning, we had said that hosting the stories on Google Labs was temporary. We want to help interested news publishers cover stories this way on their own websites. The Times and Post had teams of reporters publishing through the Living Stories format for over two months, which helped us collect a lot of data and feedback, and improve the code."^[4]

Problems

Living Stories does pose a problem for the revenue model of newspapers. As it doesn't redirect traffic back to the original newspaper articles, and makes its content freely accessible to its readers, publishers lose support for advertisers and produce content with no return on investment. However, publishers could potentially post advertisements alongside the articles, following the shared revenue model elaborated by Google Fast Flip.^[5]

Related Research Articles

Blogger is an American online content management system (CMS) which enables multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. Pyra Labs developed it before being acquired by Google in 2003. Google hosts the blogs, which can be accessed through a subdomain of blogspot.com. Blogs can also be accessed from a user-owned custom domain by using DNS facilities to direct a domain to Google's servers. A user can have up to 100 blogs or websites per account.

Groklaw was a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003 by paralegal Pamela Jones ("PJ"), it covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU antitrust case against Microsoft, and the standardization of Office Open XML.

Google News is a news aggregator service developed by Google. It presents a continuous flow of links to articles organized from thousands of publishers and magazines. Google News is available as an app on Android, iOS, and the Web.

Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google. They can generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta-tested a cost-per-action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick offering. In Q1 2014, Google earned US$3.4 billion, or 22% of total revenue, through Google AdSense. AdSense is a participant in the AdChoices program, so AdSense ads typically include the triangle-shaped AdChoices icon. This program also operates on HTTP cookies. In 2021, over 38.3 million websites use AdSense.

<i>Chicago Reader</i> Alternative weekly newspaper in Chicago

The Chicago Reader, or Reader, is an American alternative weekly newspaper in Chicago, Illinois, noted for its literary style of journalism and coverage of the arts, particularly film and theater. It was founded by a group of friends from Carleton College.

In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, feed reader, news reader, RSS reader or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates syndicated web content such as online newspapers, blogs, podcasts, and video blogs (vlogs) in one location for easy viewing. The updates distributed may include journal tables of contents, podcasts, videos, and news items.

Google Reader was an RSS/Atom feed aggregator operated by Google. It was created in early 2005 by Google engineer Chris Wetherell and launched on October 7, 2005, through Google Labs. Google Reader grew in popularity to support a number of programs which used it as a platform for serving news and information to people. Google closed Google Reader on July 1, 2013, citing declining use.

YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform owned by Google. It was launched in February 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is the second most visited website, with more than one billion monthly users who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos each day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute.

Digital journalism, also known as online journalism, is a contemporary form of journalism where editorial content is distributed via the Internet, as opposed to publishing via print or broadcast. What constitutes digital journalism is debated by scholars; however, the primary product of journalism, which is news and features on current affairs, is presented solely or in combination as text, audio, video, or some interactive forms like newsgames, and disseminated through digital media technology.

Digg Social media/news aggregator website

Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launched in its current form on July 31, 2012, with support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

A paywall is a method of restricting access to content, with a purchase or a paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase revenue after years of decline in paid print readership and advertising revenue, partly due to the use of ad blockers. In academics, research papers are often subject to a paywall and are available via academic libraries that subscribe.

The decline of newspapers has been debated, as the industry has faced slumping ad sales, the loss of much classified advertising and precipitous drops in circulation. In recent years, newspapers' weekday circulation fell 7% and Sunday circulation fell 4%, both showing their greatest declines since 2010. Overall, the industry continues to shrink, with Editor & Publisher’s DataBook listing 126 fewer daily papers in 2014 than in 2004. To survive, newspapers are considering combining and other options, although the outcome of such partnerships has been criticized. Despite these problems, newspaper companies with significant brand value and which have published their work online have had a significant rise in viewership.

Chromium is a free and open-source codebase for a web browser, principally developed and maintained by Google. Google uses the code to make its Chrome web browser, which has additional features.

An ebook, also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Although sometimes defined as "an electronic version of a printed book", some e-books exist without a printed equivalent. E-books can be read on dedicated e-reader devices, but also on any computer device that features a controllable viewing screen, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Google Fast Flip was an online news aggregator from Google Inc. that mimicked the experience of flicking through a newspaper or magazine, allowing visual search of stories in manner similar to microfiche. It was launched in beta by Google Labs at the TechCrunch 50 conference in September 2009.

OpEdNews OpEdNews Website (www.OpEdNews.com)

OpEdNews is a United States-based progressive/liberal news, antiwar activism, and opinion website founded by Rob Kall in 2003.

Google Play Books, formerly Google eBooks, is an ebook digital distribution service operated by Google, part of its Google Play product line. Users can purchase and download ebooks and audiobooks from Google Play, which offers over five million titles, with Google claiming it to be the "largest ebooks collection in the world". Books can be read on a dedicated Books section on the Google Play website, through the use of a mobile app available for Android and iOS, through the use of select e-readers that offer support for Adobe Digital Editions, through a web browser and reading via Google Home. Users may also upload up to 2,000 ebooks in the PDF or EPUB file formats. Google Play Books is available in 75 countries.

Newsbeuter is a text-based news aggregator for Unix-like systems. It was originally written by Andreas Krennmair in 2007 and released under the MIT License. The program is aimed at power users and strives to be "the mutt of rss feed readers." It supports the major feed formats including RSS and Atom and can import and export subscription lists in the OPML format. Newsbeuter (podbeuter) also supports podcasting and synchronization. As of 2017, the project is no longer maintained; the original developers advise users to switch to Newsboat, an actively maintained fork of Newsbeuter.

Apple News is a news aggregator app developed by Apple Inc., for its iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS operating systems. The iOS version was launched with the release of iOS 9. It is the successor to the Newsstand app included in previous versions of iOS. Users can read news articles with it, based on publishers, websites and topics they select, such as technology or politics.

AMP is an open source HTML framework developed by the AMP Open Source Project. It was originally created by Google as a competitor to Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News. AMP is optimized for mobile web browsing and intended to help webpages load faster. AMP pages may be cached by a CDN, such as Microsoft Bing or Cloudflare's AMP caches, which allows pages to be served more quickly.

References

↑ Singh, Neha & Cohen, Josh (December 8, 2009). "Citizen Voices". Google News Blog. Archived from the original on 2010-07-01. Retrieved April 22, 2010.
↑ "Living Stories, Frequently Asked Questions". Archived from the original on 2011-04-30. Retrieved April 22, 2010.
1 2 Singh, Neha & Cohen, Josh (February 17, 2009). "Open-Sourcing the Living Stories Format". Google News Blog. Archived from the original on 2010-04-10. Retrieved April 22, 2010.
↑ Ryan Verost (March 5, 2010). "Google's Living Stories is in a Coma at the Moment". Google News Blog. Archived from the original on 2010-03-07. Retrieved April 22, 2010.
↑ Emma Heald (September 15, 2010). "Google News Fast Flip: offers fast browsing to readers and a revenue share to publishers". Archived from the original on 2009-09-22. Retrieved April 22, 2010.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[Singh,_Neha_&_Cohen,_Josh-1] Singh, Neha & Cohen, Josh (December 8, 2009). "Citizen Voices". Google News Blog. Archived from the original on 2010-07-01. Retrieved April 22, 2010.

[Frequently_asked_questions-2] "Living Stories, Frequently Asked Questions". Archived from the original on 2011-04-30. Retrieved April 22, 2010.

[Living_Stories_Open_Source-3] 1 2 Singh, Neha & Cohen, Josh (February 17, 2009). "Open-Sourcing the Living Stories Format". Google News Blog. Archived from the original on 2010-04-10. Retrieved April 22, 2010.

[Living_Stories_in_a_Coma-4] Ryan Verost (March 5, 2010). "Google's Living Stories is in a Coma at the Moment". Google News Blog. Archived from the original on 2010-03-07. Retrieved April 22, 2010.

[Google_News_Fast_Flip-5] Emma Heald (September 15, 2010). "Google News Fast Flip: offers fast browsing to readers and a revenue share to publishers". Archived from the original on 2009-09-22. Retrieved April 22, 2010.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]