Google has open-sourced its Living Stories tool, as it looks to spur adoption of the service by newspaper groups.
Living Stories creates a single webpage for each news story, which is updated as new articles are written. A timeline lists the stories in chronological order, with filters offering the ability to show only images, headlines, videos, or specific types of article, say opinion pieces.
Articles that have already been read will be greyed out, and update alerts can be sent over email or subscribed to via an RSS feed.
By making Living Stories open source, the company hopes to engage with web developers to continue experimenting with this experimental tool
The technology was developed in partnership with the The New York Times and The Washington Post and the papers have been trialling it since December 2009.
Despite the development time, pages remain cluttered affairs, filled with links, images and dense text, but Google is clearly hoping that by open-sourcing Living Stories it can spur developers to take more risks with the layout.
“Google sees this as a first step toward further collaboration with news organisations,” Google claims. “By making Living Stories open source, the company hopes to engage with web developers to continue experimenting with this experimental tool.
“While it is still in its early stages, Living Stories is a part of Google’s broader aim to find new methods of delivering and consuming news online,” it concludes.
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