Well, that’s embarrassing.

[FailBlog]

Presidential identification fail is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google’s still feeling all announcey, with the addition of something called “living stories” to its repertoire of announcements over the past few days.

The project looks like the Google News topic pages got drunk and shagged Wikipedia, and the result is a hybrid results page that condenses the hell out of results to give users an overview of any given topic. Google’s got a rundown on their blog explaining the initiative, teaming up with the New York Times and the Washington Post to present a couple of sample topics for Living Stories.

Blogging in general has been a bit of an influence, with a heavily hyperlinked summary at the top of the page:

Below that is a menu on the left side, allowing users to focus on certain aspects of a story: Events, Articles, People, Quotes, Resources, Images, Videos, Audio, Graphics and Opinion are the choices currently listed:

Interesting especially is the inclusion of the two big print news names, the Washington Post and the New York Times. It may signal a coming larger acceptance on the part of print media to bend or break now, to change revenue models before it’s too late. (If it isn’t already.) Google addresses this in the first paragraph of the post, basically acknowledging that they’re at the center of the issue and ha, ha, ha!, they’re totally running with it!

The interface is truly cool, limiting the legwork needed for casual users to get much more dynamic, relevant results. (For instance, once you visit, some of the information you’ve seen becomes greyed out so new to you tidbits are easily recognizable- try that with your newsprint, Chicago Sun-Times.) There’s a video below from the Google blog, and here’s how they described it in their own words:

The idea behind Living Stories is to experiment with a different format for presenting news coverage online. News organizations produce a wealth of information that we all value; access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows. A typical newspaper article leads with the most important and interesting news, and follows with additional information of decreasing importance. Information from prior coverage is often repeated with each new online article, and the same article is presented to everyone regardless of whether they already read it. Living Stories try a different approach that plays to certain unique advantages of online publishing. They unify coverage on a single, dynamic page with a consistent URL. They organize information by developments in the story. They call your attention to changes in the story since you last viewed it so you can easily find the new material. Through a succinct summary of the whole story and regular updates, they offer a different online approach to balancing the overview with depth and context.

Google still on announcing kick, now introducing “living stories” is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google announced today that they’re now offering “twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price.”

Comparing starter prices to the cost of a “triple mocha,” plans range from 20GB to 16TB, and Google helpfully equates how much you can store in pictures taken by “a 5 megapixel camera.” The five tiers offered to me when I opened the product page were:

20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)
80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)
200 GB ($50.00 USD per year)
400 GB ($100.00 USD per year)
1 TB ($256.00 USD per year)

While the cost is slightly higher per gigabyte (and a subscription, not a one-off purchase), it’s not prohibitively so when held up against standalone storage. And although some people fear cloud-based storage for stability or privacy, storing data via Google also means you won’t have to worry about spilling a coffee on your kid’s baby pictures or a project you’ve been working on for six months slipping from your pocket on the F train to be smashed beneath the feet of rush hour commuters. Also gone are the days where you spend your entire commute patting yourself on the back for preparedness, only to arrive at your desk realizing you left your files in your other purse or pants.

Integration with Google’s email and photo storage accounts is a natural plus for those who already use those services, too. I’ve had some kind of storage-consolidation item on my to-buy list for some time, meaning to spring clean all my computers (okay, some time=three years, but shut up, I’m a busy person who also likes napping) and I’ll be looking to Google as soon as I need more space imminently. Do you plan on taking advantage of Google’s newly cheaper storage options?

[Image]

Google slashes storage prices, offering 20GB for $5G is a post from: The Inquisitr

There’s nothing like a good dose of rhetoric to galvanize the troops to fight the enemy. It doesn’t matter if there is any truth in the rhetoric. As long as you can do everything possible to demonize the enemy the truth isn’t something that need to worry about.

A perfect example of this demonizing rhetoric was the recent speech by Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton, who is also the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, at the annual PricewaterhouseCoopers Entertainment and Media Outlook event. In his speech Hinton referred to Google as a giant vampire sucking the blood out of the newspaper industry.

“There is a charitable view of the history of Google,” said Mr. Hinton, who is also publisher of The Wall Street Journal. “[It] didn’t actually begin life in a cave as a digital vampire per se. The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this kind of blood.”

Source: Crain’s New York Business :: WSJ publisher calls Google ‘digital vampire’

As much as it might satisfy old media to believe that Google’s sole purpose it to destroy their business nothing could be further from the truth in my opinion. If one steps back from this kind of inflammatory rhetoric for even a second and consider how Google makes their money you would see the first stake piercing Hinton’s argument.

Google makes its money from advertising. The advertising usually appears at the top of the return results or along the right hand side of the page. Those ads are suppose to be geared towards matching any search term supplied. Now look at this graphic of the Google News page

Funny, I don’t see any advertising on the top part of the as shown here, and neither do ads show up any where else on the page. So explain to me just how Google is making any money from displaying links to news headlines that go directly to the news site where the article originated at.

The argument that the newspaper industry likes to use is that they aren’t seeing an effective enough click through rate on stories that show up on Google News.

The essential problem is that publishers do not feel that the click through rate to articles is high enough, and therefore any additional advertising revenue that they would gain from extra viewings of individual articles does not compensate for the income they lose from readers not going direct to their newspaper websites.

Source: Editors Weblog :: Google News and newspaper publishers: allies or enemies?

Emma Heald at Editors Weblog goes on to say that the newspaper’s are only seeing a click through rate of about 10% because they say that readers are only scanning the headlines and passing up on reading the full story on the newspaper site. Well DUH! do they really think that every person reading a newspaper reads every single article in a newspaper?

Not likely. Most people when reading something like a newspaper will typically scan a page for headlines of a story that might interest them. If they don’t they turn the page. Trying to use this as an argument against Google News only goes to show the inflated sense of self-importance that newspapers have of themselves. They are deluding themselves if they think that people buy a paper and then without fail read every single article.

The other point that newspapers like to flaunt is that they need subscription money from people that want to read their content in order to survive.

Who are they trying to kid with this?

Let’s look at the subscription argument from two points. The first is that even in the print version of newspapers subscription, and news stand prices, the amount of money earned is, and always has been the smallest part of their revenue stream. Newspapers primary income comes from advertising, the majority of it specifically from classified ads. Trying to now make the case for subscriptions being the sole way for newspapers to survive online is digitally stupid.

The other part about the subscription argument that fails the logic test is that people will be willing to pay multiple news providers for basically the same content. Excuse me but how many people do you know that have multiple subscriptions to newspapers? To think that peoples behavior online would be any different than their offline behavior is another sign of digital stupidity.

The newspaper industry is so locked into trying to bring an antiquated business model into an online world that doesn’t operate the same way that it is trying to blame anyone, and everyone, for their failings. Instead of stepping back from the whole situation and looking at this new world with fresh eyes the industry is only going to contribute to its own demise.

WSJ publisher practicing ‘digital stupidity’ is a post from: The Inquisitr

The expanded Google News Archive will let you search for print publications from decades ago and see them in their original form. Content, naturally, is being added bit-by-bit. Some highlights of history are already included, though, such as a 1969 article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the first steps on the moon. Newspapers are being imported in their entirety, including smaller articles and even ads.

“Stories we’ve scanned under this initiative will appear alongside already-digitized material from publications like the New York Times as well as from archive aggregators and are marked ‘Google News Archive,’” Google Product Manager Punit Soni explains in his blog. “Over time, as we scan more articles and our index grows, we’ll also start blending these archives into our main search results so that when you search Google.com, you’ll be searching the full text of these newspapers as well,” he explains.

As of now, you can access the archives through both the Google News Archive page and through the timeline option on Google News search.

Google News Archive to Bring Old Newspapers Online is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Google News Blog mysteriously mentions a series of “experiments” being run on the service over the few weeks. Even more intriguing: Only randomly selected users will even see the tests.

“We’ll be running some experiments on the look and feel of our site, based on an accumulation of user research and feedback, as well as the evolving state of online journalism,” the blog explains.

“They’ll only be visible to a small number of random Google News readers. (In case you’re wondering, experiments are selected randomly, so we can’t give you any advice for how to get in!)”

The blog goes on to point out that Google often conducts these kind of random user experiments with its various services.

Google News Undergoing Secret Experiments is a post from: The Inquisitr