What strikes me about Living Stories isn’t what’s new about the idea, but what’s (relatively) old about it: It takes reverse-chronological display and other presentation concepts from the world of blogs, and applies them to a specific ongoing news story. Here are the Living Stories currently available in Google Labs.

Makes perfect sense to me: Every news story worth paying attention to is an ongoing news story, and putting everything in one place with the newest stuff up top and older items summarized below makes enormous sense.

It’s jarring when you think about it: We’re a decade and a half into the online news era, and most online news sites still feel more like newspapers than unlike them–they’ve got a home page that feels like a front page, and sections that feels like…sections. Projects such as Living Stories (and the NYT’s Skimmer view, which officially debuted last week) are interesting takes on one of the many challenges that faces news organizations: Bringing all the goodness of newspapers online, then remixing it in ways to go far beyond what dead trees could ever do.

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The Times says that the survey’s respondents would pay $3 a month for online news, which means they’re tied for Australians for that place. (Italians, by contrast, would for over $7 a month.) It’s not clear just what Americans would expect for their three bucks, or whether we’re talking about a scenario in which there’s still plentiful news available for free, or one in which freebies suddenly go away and your choice is between paying or getting no online news at all.

Anyhow, let’s try a mini-replication of the survey right here. For the sake of the following question, assume that every general-interest news site in the nation suddenly builds a pay wall, and that what you’d be paying for is some sort of pass that would give you access to multiple news sources for one monthly fee.

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The app pulls together stories from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, USA Today, TweetMeme, BBC News, CNN, and Al Jazeera, and displays them in tag clouds that attempt to indicate the relative importance of the news items they link to, both in a general view and individual ones for each news source:

You can also browse in a simpler, more straightforward list view, with summaries:

Once you choose a story, ZenNews uses an embedded version of the iPhone’s Safari browser to let you read it in the originating site. You can also share stories via Twitter and e-mail.

I like the idea of an iPhone app that aggregates important global news sources and lets you browse through them in different ways. And ZenNews is fast and fun to use. But I found that it’s most striking feature–the tag cloud-style view–didn’t do a great job of helping me figure out what was in the news, and that ZenNews’s pool of stories failed to keep up with the day’s events in a super-timely fashion.

Of course, today isn’t an ordinary news day–in the U.S., at least, the story of the boy who (turned out not to have) gone up in his parents’ experimental balloon is everywhere, and is still a developing story. There are links to it in ZenNews, but it doesn’t dominate, and you might miss it altogether. As I write this, for instance, it’s the lead item on USA Today (and every other U.S. general-interest news site). But ZenNews’s page for USA Today doesn’t include any keywords obviously related to the story:

And if you do go to the keyword “balloon” on ZenNews’s general page and press it to drill down, you get a bunch of keywords that don’t do a particularly logical job of divvying up the story. It’s not clear why you’d want to drill down further via “runaway” vs. “colorado” vs. “child” vs. “homemade”–they all lead to stories on exactly the same topic. (The “dutch” and “china” links lead to stories on a different balloon accident.)

ZenNews updates itself automatically with new stories, but doesn’t seem to do so in a particularly instantaneous manner: I’m still not seeing any of the articles reporting that balloon boy turned out not to be balloon boy after all.

Ultimately, I like ZenNews’s more straightforward list view more than the cloud, and I want to try it on a less eventful day to see if it does a better job of keeping up with the world. If you give it a try, let us know what you think…

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Fast Flip is based on Google News, and Google says it came up with it to address the fact that browsing through news sites is usually a slow process–not at all like the effortless instant gratification of flipping through a magazine or newspaper. Google has partnered with several dozen news sources–including the BBC, BusinessWeek, the Christian Science Monitor, the Daily Beast, Esquire, the New York Times, Newsweek, Salon, Slate, and TechCrunch–to create previews of their stories that live on Fast Flip but which display the first several paragraphs of the article in a form that looks like the originating site. You rifle through these previews by clicking left and right arrows, and the pages zip on and off-screen in high-speed, fluid animation–hence the “Fast Flip” name.

Fast Flip has a Like button that lets you express your approval of stories you like, and Google says that the more you use the service, the smarter it will get about presenting you with stuff you’re likely to be interested in. (It lets you browse in multiple ways–by subject, by provider, and by author.) Oh, and there are mobile versions for iPhone and Android.

It’s quite neat–pretty addictive, actually. But it’s also…kind of odd. For several reasons:

It doesn’t necessarily make browsing for news faster. The flipping interface shows one story at a time in legible form–versus the dozens that plain ol’ Google News puts on one screen–along with thumbnails in which the headlines are tiny and the articles themselves are too tiny to read. Once you click on a preview, you go to the originating site–which is no faster than usual–and getting back to Fast Flip may be kinda cumbersome, especially if you’ve clicked through to a multi-page article.

The previews break some conventions of the Web. They may have what seem to be hyperlinks, and tools like icons for printing the page, but none of this stuff works–the preview is a giant hyperlink to the article on the originating site.

The ads are un-Google-esque. Google is putting ads in Fast Flip and sharing the revenues with its content partners. Unlike classic Google text ads, these are display ads–tall, skinny ones–and while they’re context sensitive, some of the ones I’m seeing so far are a tad on the cheesy side:

It doesn’t always work. Fast Flip doesn’t carry a beta tag, but it’s a Google Labs project, so it’s experimental by definition. I found it a bit quirky–one Slate page was so wide it didn’t fit in the preview, for instance. And this one-line Atlantic blog post doesn’t really need a preview, except that Fast Flip fails to display the embedded video that makes the text make sense:

I don’t mean to be overly nitpicky–Fast Flip is clever, and I hope it sticks around and evolves. If you check it out, let us know what you think.

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Schultz’s piece speaks of “parasitic aggregators reprint or rewrite newspaper stories, making the originator redundant and drawing ad revenue away from newspapers at rates the publishers can’t match.” If Schultz is concerned about sites republishing copyrighted news stories in their entirety without permission, I agree; that’s theft of intellectual property and should be stopped. But existing laws can do the job.

Schultz doesn’t define the sort of sites she’s talking about very clearly, and the only two examples mentioned are in a quote she uses: Newser and Tina Brown’s Daily Beast. In a follow-comment, she does say she has “no problem with an aggregator who provides only a headline, perhaps a summary sentence and a link that drives readers to this site,” which presumably lets Google News off the hook. But there are countless sites that summarize other sites’ stories in the process of commenting on them, sometimes providing additional information, and otherwise continuing the conversation (and, of course, linking back to the originating site).

I’m not sure where Schultz draws the line as to what forms of aggregation are acceptable and which ones aren’t. But I do know this: A world without aggregation and summarization would be one in which sites like Technologizer couldn’t exist. Schultz’s proposed law, if it applied to Technologizer and there wasn’t a way to opt out, would kill this site almost immediately. A huge percentage of our traffic comes from other sites that quote us (often in large chunks), summarize us (often in an admirable concise fashion), and send readers our way. If the law forbid them from doing so, our traffic would nosedive instantly, and we wouldn’t be able to make enough from advertising revenue to continue.

In other words: Please, world, aggregate Technologizer all you want as long as you link to us. It’s how we get noticed. It’s how we make the money that lets us do this.. It’s the surest proof that we matter, and best path to a healthy future.

The forced revenue sharing and 24-hour embargo that Schultz approves of wouldn’t help. If sites had to pay to riff on Technologizer’s stories and link to us, most wouldn’t, and after 24 hours have passed, news usually isn’t news–a vast percentage of all links to our stuff come in the first day.

Schultz brings up a 1918 court case to buttress her argument. She might be happy if the media biz and its economics were the same as they were back then. But the Web utterly changes how news is created, distributed, and consumed, and precedent from almost a century ago just isn’t very useful.

Now, I’m not presumptuous enough to argue that Technologizer has given the world more than the Cleveland Plain Dealer has, or that its continued existence is more essential. But I’m utterly convinced that Schultz’s proposal would hurt the Plain Dealer as much as it would a teensy site like Technologizer: If it were the law of the land, the paper’s content would be less relevant, less discussed, less read.

Change can be painful. It has plenty of downsides. It may result in worthy enterprises going away. But how many examples are there of change being successfully outlawed? A lot fewer than instances in which venerable institutions adeptly adjusted as the world changed around them.

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I’m shocked and distressed by both developments. But I’m also part of the problem. I stopped subscribing to the Globe years before I left Boston, and have never taken the Chronicle. The last print paper I subscribed to was the New York Times, and I canceled that a couple of years ago–in part because it kept getting stolen off my stoop, but also because it often sat unread in my living room.

But it’s not just that I don’t need any newspaper enough to pay to get it delivered to my home. I’m having trouble remembering the last time I read any copy of any newspaper. It was probably a USA Today that was sitting outside my hotel room during a trip–when I pick up that paper and stick it on the dresser, I usually glance at the headlines, at least. But not always. And I can’t tell you when I last spent enough time with USA Today to open the paper up and read the stories it contained. (By the time I encounter it, I’ve usually read a lot of news. On the Web. Which I can do without so much as opening the door.)

I’m feeling guilty just writing this–I grew up in a family that subscribed to three or four papers; my first job was delivering the Boston Herald (badly); I used to spend hours in the Boston Public Library’s newspaper room reading articles and comics from around the world; and I might not have gotten into the profession I did if it weren’t for all that exposure to inspiring journalism printed on dead trees. But I get my news from the Web now, with a dose of radio and a smidgen of TV. I don’t think I could retrain myself to read papers if I tried.

Here’s a little silly T-Poll:

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It’s a welcome addition, since Alltop, while cool, has also been a little overwhelming. Guy describes it as an online magazine rack, which makes sense, but with it’s so vast and jam-packed that it reminds me of one of those New York newsstands that’s so dense with magazines that it’s simultaneously exciting and intimidating.

You know, one like this (photo borrowed from The New York Review of Magazines):

With MyAlltop, you start by rummaging through Alltop’s topic pages. But every feed on every page now has a plus sign: Click it, and that feed gets added to your My Alltop page. Which looks just like any other Alltop page, except every feed is one you picked, and you can order them on the page to your liking:

I also like the fact that MyAlltop pages are public–there’s actually no way to hide them–so you can share a link to yours to show what you’re reading. Here, for instance, is the Technologizer tech-news page I’m in the process of constructing. (It’s still a work in progress.)

Alltop has always been entertaining to burrow through; MyAlltop makes it a lot more personal, and more useful if your goal is to dive in, see what’s new in your favorite feeds, then dive out. It’s not a replacement for your current RSS reader–in fact, it’s not really an RSS reader at all, since you select from Alltop’s list of feeds rather than plugging in any URL you please. But it’s fun, fast, and very, very simple to use. If you check it out, let me know what you think.

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Me, I’m a fan–the site’s algorithm does a remarkably fast, effective job of figuring out what’s newsworthy in tech news and pulling together stories about it in real time. Techmeme isn’t perfect, but it comes closer to perfection than any other tech aggregator I know of, including the surprisingly slow and lumbering Sci/Tech section of Google News. Which is particularly impressive considering that Techmeme is the brainchild of one clever guy, Gabe Rivera.

(Obligatory full disclosure: Techmeme has been reasonably kind to Technologizer in terms of linking to us–we’re generally somewhere on its Leaderboard list of its most popular sources, though not near the top. But I was a Techmeme admirer before anything I wrote had ever shown up there.)

Among the things I like about Techmeme is that it has a personality. It may be a bot that chooses and arranges content via math, but it’s never felt soulless or impersonal–it’s been more like a smart, well-informed buddy who has a definite take on what’s important.

Today, founder Rivera made headlines–on, appropriately enough, Techmeme–by saying that his site’s algorithm isn’t smart enough. He’s hired journalist Megan McCarthy, a veteran of Wired and Valleywag, to add a human touch to the site. It sounds like most of what happens will still be determined by the algorithm, but Megan will do some pruning and rearranging of the stories that Techmeme links to.

Initial response to this development from the tech press seems to be cautious. (Or, in some cases, openly cranky: TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, whose site tops the Techmeme Leaderboard, says it turns Techmeme into “in many ways just another news site.”) It clearly behooves anyone to spend some time with the human-touched Techmeme before giving it a definitive thumbs-up or thumbs-down. But I already know I like the idea.

In his post announcing the news, Gabe is a bit tough on himself–Techmeme was already pretty darn amazing–but he’s right that there are mistakes in judgment that a computer will make that a human won’t, such as leaving up a story after the facts have made it obsolete. (Gabe’s example: His WeSmirch gossip aggregator spotlighting a story about Anna Nicole Smith being rushed to the hospital even after it had been confirmed that she was no longer with us.)

So I’m optimistic about the notion of a terrific algorithm and a knowledgable editor collaborating on Techmeme. Computers are good at doing a lot of heavy lifting faster than any number of humans ever could, but people have proven that they’re pretty good at fit, finish, and fine-tuning, which is what it sounds like Megan will concentrate on.

I’ll let you know if I change my mind based on any changes in Techmeme’s timeliness and sensibility in the coming weeks–and I’ll try not to let my conclusions be utterly swayed by its treatment of Technologizer, good or bad.

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