iEntry 10th Anniversary
RSS
Contact
 |
|
Google Changing Online News With 
By: Jordan McCollum 2009-12-09 In case youve been . . . I dont know, asleep for the last two years, you probably realize that the Internet is changing the way people get their news. Newspapers are having... ...a notoriously hard time adapting. But Google, in partnership with the New York Times and the Washington Post, is trying to change that"and change the way we use news on the Internet (and, from the sounds of it, possibly the Internet altogether). The result is a more dynamic news page called a Living Story. At the top of the page, theres a short summary of the whole story to date. Below that, they have a timeline of headlines, then all individual stories on a given topic on one page, sorting them in reverse chronological order (or filtered as you choose from the left-hand pane). To indicate individual stories importance, the summary of the story is longer or shorter (or omitted). The full text of the story is accessible on the page. The page remembers what stories youve visited and whether youve been there before, and hides or grays out things youve already read. And naturally, email and RSS updates are available. Of course, Living Stories only work for stories that . . . you know, live. In their video, Google uses the war in Afghanistan page and the health care reform page as examples"stories that have some new related headline every day. (Note that both the Post and the Times each have a page for each story, so there are two health care reform living stories, etc.) The left-hand navigation allows you to filter stories by location/subtopic (preselected), story/data type, importance and chronological order. Although I do like the format, Im not as impressed as I wanted to be with the implementation. (Probably has to do with the fact that the first coverage I saw led with a quote about how pages are a false paradigm for the web and we should be so over them by now.) The reality is that its just AJAX. The organization is better for learning about the long-term view of a story. And its nice to know when checking up on a familiar story that you wont reread something accidentally. For day-to-day news, though, unless you only want to track every story on a certain topic, its probably not the best way to remain informed about world affairs. What do you think? Are Living Stories a revolution to online news? Will they be the wave of the future? Comments Tag: Google Living Stories Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Reddit |  Furl Have a bookmark! -  About the Author: Jordan McCollum is a staff writer for the popular marketing blog Marketing Pilgrim. She has worked in search engine optimization with clients including 3M, Little Giant Ladders and ADP. After graduating from Brigham Young University, Jordan joined the SEO copywriting team at the Internet marketing firm 10x Marketing. After 10x closed its doors in December 2006, Jordan became a freelance writer and Internet marketing consultant specializing in SEO. She also has extensive experience with web analytics, conversion rate enhancement and e-mail marketing. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SearchNewz
is an iEntry, Inc. ® publication
©
$line) {
echo $line ;
}
?>
All Rights Reserved. Newsletter Archive - Privacy Policy - Legal - Sitemap - Contact Us - RSS Feeds - Newsletter Signup |
