Working in collaboration with The New York Times and The Washington Post, Google has created a new means of content generation that could provide a markedly different experience for people visiting online news providers.

Google’s “Living Stories” was revealed last year in October by a post on the Official Google Blog. The google lab experiment aims to create a single page where readers can follow one story in the news, tracking new developments as they occur and are reported.

At the time, Google announced that it hoped to make the tool available to publishers outside of their initial test in Google Labs. Last week, this aim was realised, with the company announcing that the Living Stories tool is now open source – inviting all web developers to use their code to build their own pages with the new feature.

A ‘living story’ will feature a single web page with several standard features, continuously updated as more information comes in. Each page will begin with a summary at the top of the page, rewritten to reflect updates and to highlight the most important information. There will also be a running catalogue of information related to the story, ordered chronologically with precedence given to the latest information. A time line displayed on each page will provide an instant snapshot of the story’s most important developments.

By using filters on the left hand side of the page, users will be able to identify the most important elements of an ongoing story – the people involved, the source material, images, audio, quotations, etc – and each page will also be personalised to according to the reading patterns of each individual user. This means that previously viewed updates will be collapsed, ensuring that new information is clearly visible; users can also subscribe to each page via an RSS feed or email alerts.

This new tool may prove extremely useful to news content. Marketing an online news provider as the source for relevant, recent information could be made much easier by sidestepping the limitations of the typical newspaper article, where information from prior coverage is often repeated and writers are forced to presume that their audience is unfamiliar with any previous developments in the story. By using a consistent URL for dynamic content generation, a different experience is given that could be profoundly effective in balancing overview with depth and context specific to the reader.