Don't write off old articles

DIGITAL CHALLENGE PROFILE: Martin Bachwerk, Storyflow: Storyflow is designed to take the chaos out of searching for past coverage of a topic on the web, by providing a timeline overview of related stories

STORYFLOW’S storyline widget replaces the outdated “related stories” lists on news sites and blogs by providing the reader with a timeline overview of the story’s main topics and associated articles. As a result, the reader can quickly grasp the bigger picture behind any news story.

Created by Trinity College Dublin PhD student Martin Bachwerk, it allows a longer story to be told about a particular topic, as opposed to access to fragmented articles.

“Newspapers and blogs generate huge volumes of quality stories, but they become inaccessible to the reader once they become archived and are no longer on the homepage/landing page. The idea behind Storyflow is to provide the reader with a path to these stories. Storyflow connects articles on a particular topic,” he says.

Bachwerk has been interested in computers and the internet since he was a teenager, making his first websites at the age of 15. “It was really new at the time. The internet and websites were just becoming popular,” he says.

He went on to study technical communication – a combination of computer science and communications – at university in Germany. There he developed an interest in news sites and blogs, embarking on a master’s thesis which analysed and tracked coverage of stories.

“As part of the analysis I looked for specific keywords such as ‘global warming’ and tracked the coverage of them to see if the words were used more in newspapers than blogs and vice versa,” he says.

“The idea for storyflow was a spinoff of that. I didn’t commercialise at the time though, as I wasn’t sure what the commercial angle could be.”

Bachwerk then moved to Dublin to undertake a PhD at TCD in computational linguistics.

“I started doing web projects again while doing the PhD as I knew I didn’t want to go into academia. I like doing hands-on projects that can be useful for people, not just theoretical stuff.”

It was while doing the PhD, that he came up with the idea for the now defunct Utopica, which was a news analysis and stock market prediction tool.

“The tool would be used to predict stock market fluctuation and prices. I pitched it for Start-up Bootcamp but didn’t get through to the top 10 teams. I then simplified the idea to just do news analysis, showing the evolution of stories. That’s how Storyflow came about.”

The widget is currently being trialled on The Irish Times business site. When someone searches for a particular topic, for example “Anglo Irish Bank”, they can see a timeline showing all the stories relating to the bank over the last few years by clicking into any article about the subject.

“At the moment we are trying to improve the tool and come up with a version that is fun and engaging for the reader. We don’t just want timeline charts. At the same time we must keep it simple for the reader to navigate through the articles.”

Bachwerk says the widget will help news organisations by generating additional page views of older articles in the paper. News outlets will be charged a nominal fee every time someone clicks on a link within the widget.

It is self-promoting, according to Backwerk, as people will notice it on sites.

“That said, we’ll offer the widget to smaller blogs at the beginning in order to promote it and increase exposure, as well as approaching larger news organisations,” he says.

“Ultimately, we want to have an affiliate network of publishers. That way the widget can be filled with articles on a particular topic from several publications. A blog [might only have] two articles about a particular topic, but the widget will be full, as it will pull articles from other sites too.”

Bachwerk says the seemingly infinite potential of online publishing means there are no boundaries to the widget being used by news organisations and bloggers around the world.

“The only limitation to the widget is that it only works with English language articles.”