Processing .....please wait.. 
The article has been forwarded.... 
Google to open source Living Stories
Thursday, 18 February 2010, 19:01 IST
Bangalore: Google has decided to go open source for its Living Stories project and make it available to news outlets globally. Living Stories was developed together with the New York Times and the Washington Post to increase user engagement by collecting all the different pieces of a story in one place as well as making it easier for the user to follow it over time, according to The Guardian.
The Living Story sorts content according to how important it is and makes it possible for the reader to approach it in different ways - focusing on news, timeline, graphics, quotes, and resources. "We look forward to working with developers and journalists to see how we can work together on Living Stories. We're keen on finding new innovative ways for news publishers to deliver content and find online readers, and this is one of many efforts we're working on in that direction," said Google's print content partnerships Director for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Santiago de la Mora.
With Living Stories, Google tries to play a further part in transforming journalism into the digital era. Up till now, Google only delivered traffic. Although recently there have been some discussions as to whether trafficwise Facebook might be a new threat to Google, its figures are impressive overall. "Google news deliver 1bn clicks per month directly and 4bn clicks from Google overall," says de la Mora.
The project recently implemented on the Google news homepage in the US, was generally welcomed by critics. According to Google, 75 percent of people who gave feedback said they preferred the Living Stories format to the traditional online news article. "On an average visit, users spend more than nine minutes with each story", said Google spokesperson Oliver Rickman about Living Stories.
