Search engine Google has launched a new ‘Living Stories’ news experiment with the New York Times and the Washington Post, to see how news stories would look if its content was centralised in a single page. The experiment is what Google has previously described as ‘Living URLs’, it is a single page which secures coverage of a news story and recognises who you are and your ‘read state’. This means it knows what you have read, and only shows you the newest information.
At the moment, as it is in the experimental stages, there are only eight stories shown on the Living Stories home page, these are: Health care from the New York Times and from the Washington Post, global warming, fixing Washington DC’s Schools, the war in Afghanistan, the Redskins, battling swine flu, and executive compensation.
The content won’t relate to everyone, as people live in different areas which aren’t yet covered by Living Stories. It will however grow and tell individual stories, which will take better advantage of the technology which the internet offers. It won’t overtake either publications or Google News, but is an additional feature for users.
In one story, only the top half of a story is being shown, Google’s senior business product manager Josh Cohen said: “It’s up to the content partners on how much they want to show. In this case, the New York Times made the decision that the top portion of that story was enough, the remaining part was all background and is covered in other ways on the Living Stories page.”
Entire stories can be shown, depending on what the publishers want, but the idea is to integrate everything into a single URL.
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