Google "Living Stories"

Posted by Brett Stacer | Posted in | Posted on 2:46 PM


Google Living Stories is a untrodden and innovative way to receive the news in this new age of technology. As our lives become busier and more complex in this fast paced world that we live in, the news that we want to receive needs to be to the point and able to give the reader what he or she needs to know on the spot. Also, as a decline of newspaper subscriptions heightens and as online articles become more prevalent, a new way to receive the news becomes a necessity. This is exactly the challenge Google Labs took upon themselves to analyze and suggest a new form of looking at the way people receive their news. This is where Google Living Stories comes into play. Instead of reading one article at a time on a popular subject, Living Stories provides the reader with an interface that provides a plethora of articles on the same subject all at the reader's fingertips. Furthermore, through the site one can receive emails when new information arrives or through an RSS feed. The widgets of this site are remarkable and allow the user to sort information by subject within the main focus and even provide a way of sorting out the information the user has already looked at. This ability gives the reader a way to look at the information he or she needs to know at the first opportunity, instead of having to take the time to sort through all of the information and decide what he or she has already viewed. Overall, this approach to news is revolutionary and will only become more popular as it makes a name for itself. Everything is condensed and easily viewed all at once in an accelerated manner as compared to online articles having to be individually searched for.

While this makes reading the latest news and keeping up with a story much easier than ever before, the current system provides an entirely new system of bias in the news. This is one of the major issues that Living Stories most combat in its development. While Google Labs is still working out some of the problems and is still fairly in a prototype phase, the existent arrangement only provides articles from the New York Times and The Washington Post. Even more critical, though is the idea that while the information on Living Stories provides easy access, the entire story behind a major issue is being edited and controlled by Google technicians, as opposed to receiving one article at a time by an already somewhat bias newspaper company. Thus, this takes the bias to a whole new level as news is 'selected' to be shown on Living Stories.

Even though I could continue to criticize Google labs for this critical error, one must remember that this is a new innovation and will take time to develop and grow into a multifarious news haven. On the contrary, I applaud Google Labs for its extraordinary effort to revamp the news in this digital era. Furthermore I must express how much I love the interface of the system. The current interface is not overly complex, yet provides simple and sophisticated ways to let the reader expand on the story through their own progress. This is done through notifications of the latest scoop, to the graying out of information that has already been accessed. The only constructive criticism I have for Google Labs is to continue their efforts and to apply more information from a more diverse pool of news providers.

Here is a video clip of what Google Labs has to say about their new experiment.

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