Google open-sources the Living Stories format

Paulo Querido — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 02:07:16 +0000

Let’s say it. This is an excellent notice to open this blog. Google announced today on the official blog that it has open-sourced the Living Stories format.

Living Stories are a new format for presenting and consuming online news. Not the graphical type of presenting like Guardian’s recent Zeitgeist that follows the best tradition of newsmaps, or even Google’s Fastflip, but a practical and logic one. One that uses search and relational algorithms from Google to put together several aspects and angles of a story, even the historical and contextual.

Neha Singh, Software Engineer, and Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager, justify: “Since we launched this proof-of-concept test on Google Labs in December, 75% of people who sent us feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article. Users also spent a significant amount of time exploring stories. This tells us there’s a strong appetite for great journalism displayed in a compelling way”

The good news is: every newspaper, blog and online publication can use the resources from Google to create it’s own living stories.

More good news: the documentation guidelines are indeed journalist’s creed. It’s not a surprise. Living Stories begin last December as a partnership between Google, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, so all the journalism-look genetics is there. Read it all, but here is the juice of the best practices:

1. Repetition should be kept to a minimum: Traditionally news articles provide a high-level summary of the developments in the story so far with every article. Since the living story has a summary section specifically dedicated for this, a summary doesn’t need to accompany every update or narrative.

2. Full attribution: For every piece of content, including photographs, videos, graphics, etc. readers should be able to see the names and biographies of the reporter, photographer, graphic designer, etc. who created it.

3. Source material: Sources of information, data and facts mentioned in the content should be exposed wherever possible. For example, copies of government documents, audio transcript of interview that the article is using quotes from, links to webpages from which data was compiled for a graphic, etc.

4. Search and filter: All the content on a living story page should be searchable. There should also be various options for users to filter the content in different ways, such as by time, by importance, by type, by contributor, etc.

5. User discussion: Along with all the coverage on a story being available at a single URL, all the discussion around the story in the form of user comments, expert commentary and trackbacks should also be available on the same page

6. User contributions: If appropriate, users should be able to contribute to the improvement of the content on the story page. For example, they should be able to request a typo correction, or request source material for a cited fact, or request a photograph be captioned, or ask for clarification of a piece of text. These requests would be treated as suggestions for the editors of the living story and would be non-binding.

7. Story tracking: Users should be able to keep track of the stories they are following or interested in via various methods such as email alerts, RSS feeds, etc.

Now what? Open source and media have not a successful marriage. Yet. Media don’t love the term “open”. Generally, “meople” (media people) thinks code if for monkeys in caves with keyboards, pizzas and no girl friends. There is a long way to go. So, I’m very curious to see how they respond. Who do you think will be the first?

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Google open-sources the Living Stories format