Google News to Add "Participant Comments"
The official Google News blog announced the following late last night:
We wanted to give you a heads-up on a new, experimental feature we’ll be trying out on the Google News home page. Starting this week, we’ll be displaying reader comments on stories in Google News, but with a bit of a twist…
The twist is that comments will be from a “special subset of readers,” those “who were actual participants in the story.”
I’m intrigued, but there are a couple of major questions about how this will work:
* How are “participants” found, invited to comment, and verified as participants?
* Will participant comments be able to be commented upon by “non-participants” i.e. regular folk?
Mashable provides some detail on the process, noting that interested commenters can e-mail news-comments@google.com with the thought that some mysterious editorial entity within the Google monolith will then decide which ones are appropriate.
This sounds like an enormous logistical challenge to say the least, what with Google News updating in more or less real time and pulling stories from something like 6,500 news sources. The new feature will begin “only in the US” and then is expected to expand to other languages and editions. I would guess that a certain subset of stories will be chosen each day to have participant comments.
Each decision – which stories to include, who the actual participants are, etc. – is in effect an editorial decision made by humans, which constitutes a very new direction for Google News, which has prided itself in some ways as being the algorithmic robot of choice for finding, aggregating, and determining which stories are important, up to the very latest second.
Tony Hung believes that Google’s enormous power will naturally draw in participating commenters, writing that, “Google being Google, it will have the brand power to attract principals who are actually part of the news to participate. Who wouldn’t want to be part of the reach that Google has?”
And ars technia brings up the great point that some publishers that were already inclined to hate on Google News for grabbing blurbs of original content may become even more jittery about the prospect of GNews becoming a platform that encourages interactivity, as opposed to merely searching and then clicking outbound news links.
