Google has come up with a Wordpress plugin that will make it possible for many to try out its experimental Living Stories model of news presentation themselves.

The Living Stories model was centered on an ongoing news development - a kind of a news thread - that would be updated with new stories and associated content.

I had written in a post when the experiment was launched:

“A new online tool that, well, isn’t exactly going to revolutionize journalism,”  is how a Washington Post article described it.

New York Times, the other participant in the experiment, had this to say. “Living stories is a much-enhanced version of what some newspaper Web sites already do by grouping material by subject matter. In the case of The Times, the paper’s Web site has thousands of “topic pages.” But those efforts have not yielded heavy reader traffic or much advertising.”

Well, how are stories packaged in Living Stories? Links to the stories can be found on this  Googlelabs page.  Google had summarized the main elements of the format when it released the code for the project.

1. Unified Coverage

Coverage related to a story is connected and available on a single web page, which is the Living Story page. This web page includes news articles and associated content such as images, videos, graphics, background, feature articles, etc.

2. Story Summary

The Living Story has a running summary of the developments that have unfolded in the story so far. The purpose of the summary is to serve readers who are new to the story or have been loosely following it.

3. Story Developments

A story’s developments often provoke new coverage. In the Living Story format, the content of a story is organized by its developments.

4. Various levels of detail

Each story development offers various views that contain different levels of detail to cater to readers with different levels of interest.

5. Prioritization of story developments

Every story development and every piece of content in a living story is prioritized by how important it is to the story. This gives readers, particularly those who are new to the story or have not been following it closely, a choice of exploring only the most important developments, for example.

6. Remembering what the user has read

In order to provide a more personalized experience to each reader, the Living Story keeps track of what the user has read i.e. the "read state". The page highlights the changes and new updates since the user’s last visit so that he or she can quickly see what they need to read.

Those without the technical expertise to deploy Google’s code on their systems, can now try it out on a Wordpress publishing system if they know how to install Google’s plugin package and theme.

A post on Google News blog on April 29, 2010 had this to say: We hope the plug-and-play solution will make it easy for you to get a Living Story up and running in almost no time at all.

That’s an interesting move because the possible user-base for the Google model will expand hugely because of the availability of these plugin. And media organizations that do not want to play around with their CMSs or story presentation models might think of trying out this model on Wordpress platform. And a few journalists might also want to use it to tell others that there are a lot of ways of presenting stories on the Net. This is one among them - tried and tested. Successful or not, I don’t know - time will tell.