Not me, unfortunately, but newspapers.
I signed up for Google’s Living Stories and I really like what I see. There is a lot of potential and I thought it was really easy to follow. The main page isn’t all that appeasing, but once your inside a “living story,” things look good. One of my suggestions for lab project would be to spice up the main page, so stories have pictures and graphs accompanying them. Because for now, it just looks like a lot of text.
But Living Stories isn’t the only thing that Google recently launched. There is another Google Lab project, Fast Flip. It’s a lot more appealing than Living Stories, but it doesn’t offer the features of following an evolving story. Still, if you check out the page on Fast Flip, you can see how it allows readers/users to easily pick and choose which story they want to read, and from which publication.
Fast Flip started out with 39 news organizations and recently expanded to 55. What’s great about Fast Flip is how advertising works — and to me, it’s a sign that the times are getting better. The project uses a revenue sharing model, where news partners will share the revenue earned from relevant ads.
So instead of hating Google, newspapers should work with the Internet giant, and Google should work with them. After all, it looks like they want to:
Our goal is to work with the industry to help it continue to innovate and build bigger audiences, better engage those audiences and generate more revenue. We’re looking forward to innovating and iterating with all these new partners in Fast Flip.
