Online Media Cultist

When Google News announced that it was going to add “participant comments” last month, I had a lot of questions, such as:

* 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?

One month in, it’s been reported that “so far only about one hundred people have bothered to e-mail Google News and go through the complicated hassle of commenting on a story.”

Maybe Google News will have more luck with its bold move to publish wire stories on its own site, as opposed to linking out to the hundreds of websites who have deals with wire services.

In any event, Google is clearly looking to up the ante in content publishing, moving past its search and tools core to publishing (or republishing) content, inviting user interaction, and so on. This all equates to more people spending more time on Google media properties.

But in the case of participant comments, it’s not finding wide adoption as yet. It’s very interesting to see Google struggle with editorial activities that require close human interaction, as opposed to its dominance over algorithmic-driven services.

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.

TechCrunch reports that MySpace News, which is to be a Google News/social news hybrid for the social networking set, is expected to go live today (as of this writing at 8 am PST, it still has a password-protected wall up).

There are two broad avenues of thought when pondering a MySpace News site. The first has to do with creating a news portal/social news hybrid, and the second has to do with how that will fly with the MySpace hordes.

As to the first, I find the notion of creating what will be the first large-scale publisher-friendly social news site to be intriguing. Most current social news sites – particularly Digg and Netscape – treasure the notion that the community rules. Therefore, publishers looking to expose their stories and find new audiences find themselves in a somewhat murky position. Essentially, they are disincentivized from actively submitting their own stories and involving the loyal members of their communities in actively participating on social news sites.

Mike Arrington notes that MySpace News will “pull news items from a number of trusted sources” but that at some point “we can probably expect users to be able to submit news items directly.” This is a strong model, and I’m curious to see how it works in practice. Site members then have the ability to both vote for and rank stories (from 1-5), with the most popular being elevated to the top of one of 25 main categories.

This latter bit seems iffier to me. The strength of the social news experience is its simplicity. Clicking “digg it” and seeing your vote instantly recorded is simple, easy, and satisfying. Adding a layer of complexity on top of that may not be well advised.

The second question is whether or not MySpace users are interested in a news site at all, let alone a community-run one. Personally, I think it would be really fun to see a MySpace (or any large social networking or community site) do an in-house social news site. In other words, let people submit and vote for profiles themselves, and then do the same for MySpace blog posts, uploaded videos, and pictures. This seems to me to strike to the core of what the social networking experience is: self-promotion, self-expression, and popularity contests.

parislemon agrees, writing, “…does anyone who frequents MySpace really want to go there to vote on news stories?” Meanwhile, Techscape ponders what the Digg community’s reaction will be. I’m guessing it will be none too friendly!

One of the dirty little secrets of the Internet is that a great deal of the browsing and clicking and reading and interacting are done at the office, on the boss’ dime. And when you’ve hit that post-lunch lull and you’d like nothing better than for your desk to auto-magically transform into a luxuriant cot, scanning around your favorite sites can usually tide you over to when the mid-afternoon caffeine buzz kicks in with attitude.

Of course, there’s no end to diversions online. But interestingly, there are relatively few sites that constantly update. As in, hit refresh and see something different appear. That’s likely why social news sites such as Digg and Reddit have become popular, as you can watch a diverse array of stories getting voted onto the front page and take part in the community-powered action.

One of the indications that my personal viewing habits had entered the “2.0″ era was when I started browsing around Reddit instead of refreshing Drudge Report during idle moments. While I disagree with Drudge’s political slant, it was and remains a great place to find a strange and often striking block of up-to-the-minute news links. However, Reddit’s clean design, interesting selection of stories, and social news features (I maintain that there’s very few things online more satisfying than voting down someone you disagree with) make it a compelling downtime attraction.

For breaking news junkies, Google News is an easy choice, and one of the best places to search for information about a story or issue that may have been covered over the last few days. Getting confirmation on breaking news is usually best served by looking out for what’s usually a red bar running across mainstream media news sites like CNN.com and ABCNews.com. And for those with a taste for the truly tasteless and sophomoric, Fark is a standby, with specially crafted news headers like “New Jersey is all ‘whoever smelt it, dealt it.’ New York is all ‘whoever denied it, supplied it.’”

Checking RSS feeds is a great and efficient way to quickly check up on what’s going on in the subjects areas you’re interested in. I’ve recently made a significant shift away from RSSFwd.com - a nifty little service that sends RSS feeds directly to your e-mail account - to Bloglines, a more traditional RSS reader. Bloglines is great because the functionality is simple and the interface very clean.

Finally, one of the biggest time spenders/wasters of them all should not be overlooked. One of the keys for social networking juggernaut MySpace is that people have an innate desire to express themselves and connect with one another. As social networking tools and companies grow more sophisticated and savvy, niche and themed social networks are developing that are geared toward older (read = above 21) audiences.