Despite the fact that the web has become a trusted source of news, readers seeking this information do not receive fair attention. Even though you can find them published on sites in every corner 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 still can’t provide real context and deep analysis. There is no content service that acts as the bridge needed 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 partnered 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 the missing link.

project background

When Living Stories launched in December 2009, the project focused on topics like the Afghanistan war, healthcare reform, and other stories you usually find in a newspaper these days. Initially, their goal was to harness 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 from 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 aims to optimize the reader experience and give the ailing print newspaper industry a boost, but here are three ways small businesses that do a lot of content development and distribution can take advantage right away. :

1. Many online businesses use theme pages to enhance their SEO efforts. If this is something your organization is doing, take a look at their analytics to find out which topics are driving the most traffic. Then 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 internal tools that allow writers and editors to create new stories in an instant. By doing this, your company can publish a topic quickly and expand it as continued coverage is provided.

3. Think outside the box. It is quite possible that Living Stories will become a social networking 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.