8th
Any person mentioned in a news story that Google News indexes can email in their comments to news-comments@google.com. Those who do so will be asked to verify their identity and organizational affiliation. Could be really useful for any clients who would like to continue the conversation around a piece about/mentioning them, but also a bit strange as it makes Google News into more of an editorialized news outlet than just a search engine. Could get very volatile if competing companies start duking it out over there. I am a huge fan of commenting in practice, but more and more I’m skeptical of its viability, broadly applied. Outside of established and moreover productive communities of commenters/readers, the functionality rarely adds any value. It’s hard to imagine Google News ever becoming one of those communities, at least without ending up looking a lot like Techmeme, which has already very effectively accomplished the task of meme/conversation aggregation.
Besides, let’s say that Dan Farber writes a controversial piece about company X and company Y. Wouldn’t it make much more sense for company X and company Y to continue the conversation at the point of origination i.e. in the comments section of Farber’s blog? The idea that the conversation would instead take place inside of Google News (coupled with the verification of commenters as participants in the story) would seem to be proposing to make those comments part of the news itself, a line which I’m not quite comfortable crossing just yet, but which would obviously give Google a leg up in terms of (passively) adding original (human) content to the (non-human) service they provide.
