My name is Ian and Google Living Stories was my idea.

Let’s start with this. Google never ceases to amaze me. At the same time they can infuriate me faster than anything else in the world.

The scene is a year and a half or so ago and I have been working for The Kansas City Star for about 2 months. I am contemplating submitting yet another entry to the Knight News Challenge. Two years previous to that I had submitted the same idea, a social podcasting application. Now, sitting in the newsroom and having a slightly better grasp on the online news space I think of a new idea.

http://futurehat.com/wecancast/dev/design/view/index.html

What you see there is a single news story. Coverage would be collected from many sources and combined into one single story that could be browsed along a timeline. I even entitled the project “Media Timelines” The way I saw it was that news, as it happened, needed to be collected from all forms of media and combined into one topic oriented “story”. I still see it that way. Sadly the Knight Foundation judges did not.

Flash forward to today when a co-worker at my gig in boulder (non-news related) points me to http://livingstories.googlelabs.com. I flipped. Straight up flipped. This ruins my day if not my week, month and the short remainder of the year. The worst part… it’s obvious that this is google’s domain. There should have been no opportunity for me to be pissed about them “stealing” my idea because they should have done it 5 years ago.

Still, this happens to me on an increasing basis. I’m thinking I just need to stop coming up with ideas and let people tell me what to make. That way I can’t be frustrated when google beats me to it. Effin google.

Hey Google, I've got a Fast Flip for ya.

Way to go Google. Newspapers just don’t get it when it comes to RSS. So why not pander to them and make another “flip through pages” interface? I’ll tell you why… NO ONE WANTS TO READ NEWS ONLINE LIKE THEY READ A PAPER!

You know this google. You do. But in your endless quest for the dollar you choose to pander to the average editor and publisher. People don’t want to read newsPAPERS online… they want to read the NEWS online.

If you, the reader, want news your way then I suggest an entirely different google product: Google Reader let it suggest feeds to you and then go out and find your own to add. You will be flying through rivers of data in no time. Browsing a list and picking only what you want to read. Ahhh news gathering utopia. Isn’t it grand?

Yer doin it wrong.

Put the content in the screen. Not the screen in the content.