In a move that can only be called ultra-experimental, Google is now accepting reader comments on its Google News articles. In an apparent bid to juice traffic for the news aggregation service, Google has “built a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question.”
Google Blogoscoped is kind enough to offer us an example of this new reader comment option, which is good because I couldn’t find any myself. (Item continues after the jump).
In the news help section, Google spells out who can and who can’t comment and the guidelines are very vague indeed. Here is Google’s sole criterion for who can post a comment on a news article: “We want to hear from anyone who has been mentioned in a news story.”
Hmm….really, anyone? How about an article that discusses, say, major litigation surrounding who owns the patent for MP3 technology? This article might mention, for example, many entities that lay claim to inventing the technology, including Microsoft, Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Thomson, Royal Philips, Fraunhofer Society of Germany and Texas MP3 Technologies.
This article might also mention numerous licensees that could be on the hook for billions in license payments depending on how the litigation turns out including Apple, Motorola, Nokia and Sisvel. OK, so that’s at least eleven companies mentioned in this story.
Will Google allow all of these companies to comment? That’s not clear. Google says participants in the story can comment and “participants are people who are mentioned in the story or are related to organizations in the story.” Interested parties can submit a comment to Google via email and Google will follow up to establish the identities of the interested parties. Google will also solicit comments from selected parties and in that case “If we asked you for a comment and you provide us with one” the comment will get published.
Will Google edit coments? Not really. Aside from correcting typos or misspellings, “we allow them [the commenters] to say whatever they’d like about the story.”
Doesn’t Google have some responsibility for the comments its publishes aside from merely ensuring the identity of the commenter? There are a lot of crazy, mean people out there who hold down responsible jobs and get quoted in news articles and blog items. So, can these people just say what they want after only having met the low threshold of 1. being cited in the article and 2. proving they are who they say they are?
Is this freaking nuts or what? How in the world will Google manage the flood of people trying to comment on news, particularly given that the comments will be not be handled in an automated manner? How can Google justify allowing some comments to get published but not others? That would seem to me to be an editorial function, which suddenly puts Google on the hook for a host of legal liabilities.
All I can say is that Google must have a lot of people standing by to handle this new experiment. It’s possible that so few people will pay attention to this comments function that the effort (and complaints and possible lawsuits) will be minimal. But something tells me that this will be the more likely outcome: Google toys around with this idea for a few weeks or months and then quietly disbands its reader comments options.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:55 AM|Comments(0)
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