Have you heard of Google Living Stories? I’m sure most of you haven’t and neither have I until a few days ago when I read an article about it on ReadWriteWeb.
The Google Living Stories project is a new experimental way to read news online. Google developed this project in collaboration with The New York Times and The Washington Post, two of the leading newspapers in the US. Living Stories was designed to be a central hub for news where readers can easily access and navigate thru news articles, pieces and features without having to wait for pages to load. News stories each have its own summary and an interactive timeline of critical events. Story updates are highlighted while old news are summarized and collapsed so readers can easily continue where they’ve left off and follow up on the story.
Below is a video created by Google to help explain how Living Stories works:
A few days back, Google announced the release of a Living Stories WordPress plugin via the Google News Blog:
..Today we’re releasing a Living Stories plugin and theme for WordPress. Now anyone who publishes through WordPress can use the plugin to organize coverage of an ongoing event on a single dynamic page.
We first showcased Living Stories in December through a two-month-long experiment with the New York Times and Washington Post. We got great feedback from both readers and publishers. Our next step was to open-source the Living Stories format, allowing publishers to build on it using Google’s AppEngine infrastructure. We then released a version of the code that runs independent of our infrastructure. Since then, a number of publications have shared their ideas for ways we can offer additional tools to help them create Living Stories.
The WordPress plugin is a direct result of those conversations. We hope the plug-and-play solution will make it easy for you to get a Living Story up and running in almost no time at all..
To learn more about Google Living Stories, head over to the official Living Stories page on Google Labs.
I can’t really talk much about it since this is new to me but based on what I’ve seen and read from the articles and video, the Google Living Stories plugin would be most useful for online news magazines and blogs that publish other types of news stories. But I’m sure it can also be used for any type of blog topic/niche.
Anyone installed or already using the Google Living Stories WordPress plugin on their blogs? How would you use the Google Living Stories plugin on your blog? Please share your thoughts.
[via ReadWriteWeb]
Ah, now that makes good sense from Google’s behalf! Create a WordPress plugin. It is also a great punt for WordPress, as it shows that Google is taking it seriously ;-)
I look forward to seeing the Google Living Stories WordPress plugin in action. Another first from big daddy Google!
That’s another new cool service from Google. :)