The Washington Post wonders whether Google Web Elements hold the key to a brighter future for old media newspapers.
"There are no ads in the "Web Elements" (that I see) so news organizations aren't getting direct money from this for now?but they are getting greater exposure for their content and brands, courtesy of Google."
What an amazingly enlightened viewpoint. 2009 has already been an extremely challenging year for some newspapers and the incumbents appear desperate to find an online business process that might actually work. My gut instinct (informed through such people as @JeffJarvis) is that walled garden approaches, fed by micro-payments or subscriptions in return for access to restricted content, are fundamentally the wrong model. Businesses should be determining how to distribute themselves across the internet, not walling themselves off.
Enough about that - What about this Google News Web Element? Google Web Elements are embeddable widgets from google that can be added to any webpage. Web Elements can be constructed direct from Javascript, or more easily using an IFRAME tag. You can specify a size (banner or rectangle), topic (section), query, language and Google News edition. Google has a page that allows you to experiment easily with the different options.
The News Web Element above is a Rectangle showing news items about Google. Inserting it into my blog page was easy as going the Google Web Element page for the News, setting the options and pasting in the HTML it gave me. Easy - I think we will quickly see a lot of these.
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