Even though the web has become a trusted source of news, readers looking for this information don’t get their fair share of attention. Although you can find them posted on sites in all corners of the web, most static articles fail to embody the spirit captured by traditional newsworthy stories. While Twitter is one of the latest major news outlets, it is still unable to provide real context and in-depth analysis. There is no content service that acts as the necessary bridge to bring together robust editorial reporting, comprehensive archiving and real-time news delivery on a single platform. That is, until a few months ago when Google teamed up with The New York Times and The Washington Post on a new experimental project known as Living Stories, a revolutionary content model that aims to fill in the missing link.
project background
When Living Stories launched in December 2009, the project focused on topics such as the war in Afghanistan, healthcare reform, and other stories typically found in a newspaper these days. Initially, their goal was to reap the benefits of online publishing by providing unified coverage of a topic on the same dynamic web page with a consistent web address. Basically, readers can pick a topic and follow along as the story progresses on a web page with the same URL, making it easy to keep up with the material. While the potential was apparent from the jump, the first impression of Living Stories could be described as dull at best. That was just the beginning, though, and by the looks of it, Google’s new content platform has a lot more in store.
Open Opportunities
In February 2010, Google announced that Living Stories would be an open source project, making the source code freely available to developers. This adds a lot of excitement to the experiment and gives organizations a chance to see how much potential it really has. Of course, Living Stories is aimed at optimizing the reader experience and giving a boost to the ailing print newspaper industry, but here are three ways small businesses that do a lot of content development and distribution can immediately take advantage. :
1. Many online businesses use theme pages to improve their SEO efforts. If this is something your organization is doing, take a look at your analytics to find out which topics are driving the most traffic. Next, develop living stories based on each theme and publish them to the best of your ability.
2. If you have a development team on board, produce in-house tools that allow writers and editors to create new stories in a flash. By doing this, your business can publish a topic quickly and expand on it as ongoing coverage is provided.
3. Think outside the box. It’s quite possible that Living Stories will become a social media tool or even a service that helps identify local events. Stay on top of their developments and execute your strategy accordingly.
conclusion
What gives Living Stories such great potential is the fact that the project is not limited to news. For example, an author could use it as a portal to promote her books, or a publisher could use it as an ezine. In essence, it’s another web-based publishing platform that can be leveraged however you see fit.