Google Living Pages: Yet another new thing from Google this week.  This time, it’s a Google News & Labs effort hosting summaries of New York Times and Washington Post stories, in the hopes of giving providing a central place to track their evolution over time.

I’m not totally clear on how the Times or Post sites aren’t doing that now or why they wouldn’t want to do it on their own sites.  But I’m sure they’re happy to accept some help from Google, who’s happy to throw some coding resources at the mission of better organizing information from the likes of the WaPo or Grey Lady, so they can optimize where the ads go in that mix of information, and in doing so, increase the amount of money they produce.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea; maybe if you mixed in stories from various sources (or TechMeme-style aggregation around each event on the timeline), I could get into it. For now, with coverage totally siloed by source, it’s really just a small improvement on the Related Stories links on any current news article.

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