Google Living Stories

Great, they're going the exact opposite direction of what I'm willing to pay for.

I wish my local paper(s) would cancel their Monday through Saturday editions and concentrated on one great Sunday paper. I'd pay ten times as much for clear, concise, complete "dead" stories on dead trees.

Looking at this made me realize that the only news sites I really like, and actually use on a daily basis, consist essentially of a simple list of headlines.

The simple presentation makes it easy to select the stories that interest me enough to read while still giving an overview of the rest.

While the 'follow a continuing story' idea is interesting (and the presentation here is impressive), it's not something that I value. I find that I follow stories naturally, and often across multiple sites and even media types. I don't really need to see it all in one place, all at once.

This is somewhat similar to a site I have been working on. http://www.newsdive.net I am doing filtering based on story content, but this seems to be based on tags and categories more.

Concrete example: http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/lsps/healthreform

Interesting...

This is a pretty fun project. Nice, lightweight, combines multiple sources. Kind of embarrassing for the news outlets though that google can produce a better version of a full-feed experience than they can.

see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12... (via infowarrior - https://attrition.org/mailman/listinfo/infowarrior )

I wonder if they are using machine learning, humans editors or both.