Google News Adds Special Comments

Posted on August 22, 2007

Google has decided to accept comments on Google News stories. Only people mentioned in a story or related to organizations in a story can make a comment. Comments can be sent by email to news-comments@google.com. Here's how Google describes the comments in its Faq.

We're giving people related to a story the chance to directly respond to it. Their comments are linked alongside the normal media coverage of the story. We want to make the full spectrum of views and information on a story available to all Google News users. We think this feature will help us do that without sacrificing quality of our coverage. These comments will provide you with additional insight; they come from individuals with information related to a story, who otherwise may not have an outlet to present it. As a result, each story will only display a few comments.

It sounds interesting but Google may run into some trouble here when comes to trying to deal with commentor authenticity. This is a service that people will try and spam. Google is not immune to the same trolls problems that plague other comment systems. Media Shift has a good roundup about Google's comments feature.