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.
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August 8th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Many, many questions to be sure. However, if any one has the cash and will to make it happen, I think we know that Google does. I don’t really have a concern about geting people to participate. Once it catches — and I’m sure it will — Google will have no shortage of people who are interested to give their side of the story *in their own words*.
The real question is how its going to try and monitor all of these kinds of issues and comments — particularly when it allows anyone to comment. Will it try and do things algorithmically, or will it hire people to moderate? For a company that has built a 150B market cap on the former, its hard to believe that the latter is something they’d actually do … but I think its all but it impossible *not* to do, especially at these beginning stages.
Cheers
t @ dji
August 8th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Exactly - my total assumption is that they will need humans to moderate. I just don’t see a way to suss out legit comments without some kind of human intelligence layer.
The overwhelming (except perhaps for lousy-with-resources Google!) challenge is to manage the incoming requests from PR companies, legit newsmakers, bloggers, crazy folk, and on and on. Everyone will have an agenda, and humans at Google will be forced to contend with what it all means. And one thing Google isn’t known for (yet) is editorial prowess.
September 12th, 2007 at 10:14 am
[…] Google News announced that it was going to add “participant comments” last month, I had a lot of questions, such […]
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