The answer would have been a easy a few years ago: the headline, of course. It’s the link people click on and the words they search for. But as social media becomes more integrated with content, the author is becoming a more important part of a web page.

Forbes.com announced last week a re-designed article page that displays an author’s bio, social media presence and past posts much more prominently. It also introduced a so-called Comment Strip below the headline that “more deeply integrates the content creator’s community on the page” by showing thumbnails of commenters’ avatars.

Take a look at this article by Meghan Casserly. The  author’s name and a brief bio are above the headline — a rare thing for a news publication. The right-hand sidebar contains an extended bio of Casserly and highlights from her recent discussions with commenters.

Forbes is betting that the future of digital journalism lies in transactions with readers and that those discussions will lead to better journalism. Mathew Ingram made the same point yesterday in his post Memo to newspapers: The future of media is a two-way street.

Is the Casserly page more about her or her story on interview questions? The answer isn’t obvious.

Forbes is, in essence, moving away from the concept of a standalone story on its site and toward the idea of a story being part of the author’s ongoing stream of content.

Google had a related idea with its Living Stories experiment that ended last year — but it completely missed the social media aspect to journalism. Its partnership with the Washington Post and the New York Times attempted to create topic pages that were updated automatically with new developments. But the new content was created only by journalists.

Two years later, leading-edge publishers are trusting that reporters — and their audience — can supply content that is at least as important as the original story itself.

Google began displaying author names in search results in 2009. Last month it released authorship markup tools that aim to link related content to individual authors. The next step would be to link social media discussions to the same authors.

The path itself leads toward a future of the author as brand — a brand perhaps at least as important as the publication itself.

As Dan Gillmor suggests, a better name would probably be Living Topics. The service, which is an amazing technological feat, groups news stories and deconstructs them for better online viewing. Google says the automated initiative, which it launched in co-operation with the New York Times and the Washington Post, does three things:

• Puts the entire coverage of a story under a single URL
• Chunks up the story elements by theme and form
• Customizes the reading experience so each person sees story developments new to them
  

The main benefit appears to be that it automatically generates context for stories by creating bite-sized content summaries and aggressively linking between them. For example, users can sort the story content by subtopics, major characters, quotes, external links, images, graphics, video, audio, etc. The size of the story summary also indicates its importance and newness, according to this Google video.

The Living Stories site isn’t optimized for my iPhone in any way. No doubt that’s coming; this sorting and grouping feature would seem tailor-made for mobile users.

Each topic starts with a dynamic topic summary and timeline. But the service doesn’t just reformat existing content. At the story level, there are some subtle differences from the versions that appear on the news outlet’s website. Take the War in Afghanistan Living Story and a story that’s part of it (Afghan Says Army Will Need Help Until 2024) , which is also on the Times’ website. In the Living Stories version …

• a link to Hamid Karzai, for example, goes not to a detailed bio like the one on the Times site, but to a pop-up snippet description
• there’s a link (“pledged to begin withdrawing American troops”) to a related story that isn’t made on the Times site
• an interactive map, which is not in the Times story, shows the location of the capital, Kabul.

The service has the potential to improve the online reading experience in a number of ways:

• by narrowing the inverted pyramid, so stories are less broad at the top — and more to the point — because the context surrounds it
• by including more summaries, which usability advocate Jakob Nielsen says are crucial for online reading
• by more aggressively linking content than human editors can — thereby improving the user experience on small screens

Still, there seem to be limitations. The importance of topic pages would seem to be diminishing as people increasingly consume content at the story level via Twitter and Facebook links. And I can think of many stories that won’t fit easily under topic designations.

But it’s a worthy innovation. I’m waiting for the mobile version.

Google Fast Flip interface for mobile.

So this is it.

In April, Sharon Waxman reported a conversation with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in which he told her:

“In about six months, the company will roll out a system that will bring high-quality news content to users without them actively looking for it” … one in which users “will be automatically served the kind of news that interests them” … and which Google “will be able to sell premium ads against premium content.”

Google Fast Flip appears to be all that.

The company claims the visual news finding tool “personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like.”

Make no mistake — this is an application built from the ground up for mobile. (In addition to being available in Google Labs on the web, Google offers it as a mobile site for iPhone and Android devices.)

Reading stories from multiple sources isn’t easy to do on a mobile device right now. Neither is search. Done right, personalized, visual news could truly be a killer app.

As Scott Karp says, it’s “a new UI (user interface) for news.” Further, it’s Google re-asserting its claim to the browser, not the app, as the viewing space for mobile content.

Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the New York Times told Ken Doctor, “We’re trying to find out how users relate to a visual interface.” There’s certainly much to learn — and there are quirks with Fast Flip. But, the interface, with a firm nod to Apple’s Cover-Flow, is an excellent fit for mobile devices.

That’s great for consumers. And, as Nisenholtz points out, it’s the brand presence news publishers have wanted. But it also gives Google the upper hand in yet another news viewing space.

Colour-coded lines show traffic congestion in Google Maps for Mobile.

“It’s stop and go on the bridge.” “Watch out for that deer on the 102.”

The voices are a staple of local radio — listeners calling in to report traffic conditions. On-air updates build audiences, involve listeners and bring advertisers to morning and afternoon shows.

But Google believes it can deliver traffic reports faster and with more accuracy by harnessing the power of mobile users.

Google announced today it was bringing the power of crowd-sourced data to its Traffic layer in Google Maps, currently available only in the U.S.

Users of Google Maps for Mobile have to allow Google to see their location first. But when they do, they contribute traffic data anonymously and effortlessly as they travel. Their GPS-enabled mobile phone contributes their location and aggregates it with others to form a live picture of traffic in the area. Its announcement states:

When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.

Google also announced it was expanding its Traffic layer to cover all U.S. highways and arterial roads.

Google has the leading mobile map app. While it’s competing with standalone GPS providers such as TomTom and Garmin in providing driving assistance, the division between smartphones and standalone devices is already starting to fall. TomTom released its turn-by-turn maps as an iPhone app 10 days ago — the first company to do so.

Google’s move is yet another grab at services traditionally provided by news media — services that bring revenues to support local newsrooms. While newspapers have had their audiences slashed by aggregators of news and classified listings, radio has remained relatively unscathed by advances in online technology.

The move puts radio producers on notice that they too need to find other ways of strengthening listener interaction.

Source: Google News

Give Associated Press President Tom Curley credit for grabbing people’s attention.

A New York Times story today quotes him stating that online references to AP stories containing as little as a headline and a link require a licensing agreement.

The interview follows AP’s announcement Thursday that it will begin a two-pronged approach to tracking sites that re-use AP content. The first initiative will be to include new metadata in news stories to identify key attributes of the story such as the author, the placeline and usage rights attached to it. The second will be to maintain a registry of stories and use software to track the content across the Internet. The goal is “to be paid for any use.”

Calling the registry a “declaration of war,” Erik Sherman calls the move “so stupid, so clearly self-damaging that you have to wonder whether someone inside the corporation is trying to torpedo it.”

Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg chimes in, calling the effort “foolish and self-defeating.”

Most observers have focused on Curley’s comment concerning licensing for short chunks of text. But, in the Times article, Curley was coy as to how AP would go about enforcing its claims, adding, “We’re not picking the legal remedy today … Let’s define the scope of the problem.”

The prospect of suing people en masse for refusing to send money is indeed crazy. Curley’s claim would seem to ignore provisions of fair use in the American copyright act, not to mention the nature of the Internet. His intimation of enforcement would suggest he hasn’t learned much from the American recording industry’s efforts.

A story by the Nieman Lab’s Zachary M. Seward states that the New York Times’ top lawyer himself doubts aggregation is a copyright issue. Even if it is, as Google deftly pointed out to testy European publishers last week these companies can easily remove themselves from most aggregators’ reaches. Rosenberg argues in an excellent post that the real danger is the issue will end up in court where a judicial ruling could narrow the definition of American fair use provisions in its copyright act.

Too bad AP botched its PR on this.

There is actually much to admire in AP’s efforts. It’s the first major news organization to make a serious effort at tracking the use of its stories on the Internet. AP says it is using copyright-protection software made by Attributor Inc., which offers a Google Analytics-type interface for “finding copies of your content in near real-time.”

The company states, interestingly, that 30-40% of the excerpts it tracks fail to contain a referring link. That in itself indicates value in tracking egregious copyright violations and raising public awareness.

Update: Comment from AP on all the coverage

Seriously … there’s some quite good, basic reporting advice in the new YouTube Reporters’ Center. My favourites of the bunch are the Associated Press’s: How to Pitch a News Story — 2:11 of jam-packed practical advice — and NPR’s Scott Simon breezily delivering the fundamentals of audio presentation in How to Tell a Story.

Still, it’s full evidence of the tortured state of the news industry. Six days ago Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton called Google a “digital vampire.” Two months ago Associated Press chairman Dean Singleton vowed the company would pursue “legal and legislative remedies” against those he said were unfairly “misappropriating” its content. And he bluntly suggested Google was the main enabler. Now, here are some of the best minds of mainstream journalism using a Google product to advise amateurs on how to do it for free.

Google also today invited news publishers to host their videos on YouTube and participate in an advertising revenue share program via its YouTube Partner Program. CEO Eric Schmidt has promised to release more tools to help the ailing news industry and this move appears to build on comments he made in a speech to the Newspaper Association of America on April 7, 2009:

The fundamental issue is that the Internet distribution model doesn’t work on scarcity — it works on ubiquity. What we have to do is find models that involve very broad distribution and that you (news organizations) make money all along the way. We of course are in the advertising business. And we think that money will be there. We think there is a way to do it with even more targeting and even more immersive kinds of advertising models.

So Google continues to dangle a bigger and bigger carrot in front of news publishers. Take the leap, it says, free your content — the real money is in targeted advertising.

I believe Google is right about that. But it might be years before we find out.

Twist's data on "Michael Jackson" tweets on June 25.

There were some interesting observations today about the effect of Michael Jackson’s death on search services.

Google reports that interest in the June 25 event was “meteoric.” It led to one of the largest mobile search spikes Google had ever recorded, involving 5 of the top 20 searches that day. The spike in queries was so great that Google News initially mistook the barrage as an automated attack. Its software automatically suspended queries on the topic for 25 minutes, interpreting the requests as a denial of service attack.

A number of users reported that the wave of interest slowed Twitter to a snail’s pace. Twist, a site that tracks trends in Twitter, recorded “Michael Jackson” appearing in a peak of 22.61% of all tweets yesterday. Twitter temporarily disabled search results late in the day. No real surprise there. Service problems at the 2-year old start-up are well known.

Mashable reports that Facebook was actually by far the dominant sharing service for the news. Its data from widget network Clearspring shows that roughly five times as many people who shared a story using its website widget used Facebook than used Twitter. Facebook, of course, has a much larger user base. But Twitter usage received most of the media coverage.