While I have tried to seek out people who are currently trying to develop Google’s code of Living Stories I was able to interview Neha Singh, software engineer for Google and another person, we will call him Eugene, at Nature Publishing Group who is attempting to develop it further. There is a huge silence surrounding this code if in fact it was such a success that Google found it to be. Digging around the forum and discussion group, I was able to find Eugene and inquire about how he is working on the code:
Eugene pointed me to some scientific news stories for an online journal at Naturenews. “We’re looking at experimenting with it to show both science news and the human stories behind important scientific discoveries published in the journal,” said Eugene. He went on to comment about the code itself and the problems that he encountered with it. Apparently, installing and getting the code running was pretty straightforward, however, the content manager kept timing out a lot. “I do like the possibility of applying the system to stories that have already happened though I guess they’re not “living” any more. Living Stories is a good way to browse any sort of narrative, see the people involved, browse relevant media etc. The default content manager makes this as difficult as possible, unfortunately – to put in dates from say 1950, so you have to do a lot of clicking on a popup date widget, you can’t just type in the year.” It was interesting to hear how Eugene was trying to use it almost like a historical and categorical reference tool along the lines of what libraries use. This reminds me of the historical overview that wikipedia has on many topics. The difference would be that you would have a historical time line of scholarly articles using the Living Stories interface.
Back to Google’s representative – Neha Singh>>
Neha answered a lot of my questions, but couldn’t really answer the harder ones. To my understanding, he has to be careful with what he divulges to the public. For example here are a couple harder questions that were asked,
1. How does Google benefit from this type of investiture?
Our interest is in helping journalism thrive in the digital era, because it’s important to society and an important source of the high-quality information our users turn to us to find. We’re doing the Living Stories project to learn about creating more engaging experiences for consumers of news online
2. Because Google has been deemed by some as an aggregation thief of news, was the open sourcing of this, to some degree, a political move in a way to win over the hearts of the publishers and people?
Cannot comment.
3. What are those two news companies doing with it at this point since they were the two main guinea pigs for the experiment? Are they continuing to develop it on their own?
5. Is there a list or a distribution list of developers that you released it to?
We just announced it on the Google open source blog. You would have to solicit replies on the discussion forum.
Ok, it looks like I wasn’t able to get the harder answers out of him, but they do insinuate a sense that Google is trying to help out the traditional journalism’s journey to the online environment. I’m kinda skeptical at such a benevolent approach without any financial incentive. Maybe that’s why Google open sourced it in the first place. I do wonder if Google was paid by the NYTimes and The Post for their help in creating such a format. Yet, this wouldn’t be that plausible based on the fact that they open sourced it. 
One of the biggest questions that I tried to focus on was whether or not Google’s decision to open source the code for Living Stories was planned from the beginning or was it something that was considered after the experiment was over. Mr. Singh had informed me that, “Open sourcing the code was the logical next stage of the experiment and was always planned. From the beginning, we had said that hosting the stories on Google Labs was temporary. We want to help interested news publishers cover stories this way on their own websites. The Times and Post had teams of reporters publishing through the Living Stories format for over two months, which helped us collect a lot of data and feedback, and improve the code.“ I confirmed his statement, by checking the Google News Blog, which had indicated back in December, when Google started the experiment, that they were going to release it to the public after the experiment was finished. This could have a tremendous impact on the way people search for news online based on the topic. Google News aggregates and filters the topical search, but it still takes you to the traditional news article that has stayed the same for quite sometime now. The topic of the article would be the key ingredient rather than the publisher or article itself. Moreover, “If you look at search behaviour, that’s often what people search for (and why Wikipedia is so popular), declares Paul Bradshaw, of the online journalism blog, on his report of Google’s Living stories. Bradshaw asks two very important questions that many are wondering (if you decide to peruse through the discussion forum of Google’s Living Stories).
- How much of the construction of the page is done automatically, and how much requires someone to input and connect data?
- How does this address the advertising problem?
What advertising problem you ask? Well, d3vianted@gmail.com articulates this well in the discussion forum:
Publishers want to drive people to their sites in hopes of attaining ad impressions. Thus the “free” content they are giving away is providing some source of income. As more and more papers see a decline in readership and their sales decline, the money their make from their online products is becoming more and more important. Living Stories takes away any ability for the publisher to direct traffic to their sites (other than name recognition and the hopeful conversion of a curious reader) or provide any support for advertisers. Publishers would be producing content with no ROI [return on investment] simply for the convenience Google’s users.
A counter solution to this payment for content problem has just been announced by Google’s competitor Bing. Apparently Bing is trying to help UK newspapers better monetize their online news. Here’s the article.
Lastly, it would have taken more time to generate the contacts at the NYTimes and The Washington Post to inquire where they are taking the project at this point. Mr. Singh could only tell me that, “They are currently evaluating how they want to proceed.” Even if this statement foreshadows the vague undertones that surround the future of this project, it does however, imply that Living Stories is something that we could see changing the way that we consume and experience news online in the future – however long this might be.
