1.2 (1) Collaborate with the best
One piece of advice about what-to-do-not-to-suck is to be trend-setters and innovators in your own field, even if done in collaboration with others. A very interesting feature was developed in cooperation between Google Earth and the New York Times.
This partnership resulted in a layer added to the map which is updated every 15 minutes and shows the most current headlines.
This is how it works: you scroll the mouse over the area of interest and the newest headlines related to that region appear. The stories are pulled from the website of the New York Times, the headlines and a first paragraph are displayed. To avoid information overload only articles written in the last month are available. To read the whole story you simply need to click on the hyperlink and Google Earth will redirect you to the website of NYTimes.com (E&P, 2008).
This collaboration is advantageous to both parties in many ways.
“I read a lot of news by surfing the Internet, as do many of my colleagues and friends, and I’ve always dreamed of a way to browse news based on geography. What’s happening in Paris today? What are the top headlines in Japan?” – writes Wei Luo on his blog
(Lou, 2008) who is the Tech Lead Manager at Google Earth.
This is an example of how newspapers can collaborate with other online parties to spread their reach and be accessed by more people than ever before. Directing the traffic to the original NYTimes website creates an additional advantage of added revenues for the newspaper.
It’s all about the news and people finding it with the least effort.
It’s also all about money but by going out of their way to cater to the needs of news seekers and making their lives easier (by making the search for news easier), both Google AND the New York Times are better-off than they would have without the collaboration.
