User comments, a broken system

Google added the option to comment on news stories, but only by those mentioned in the story. Read more: Google News Adds Barely 100 Comments in 30 days

Good? Bad? I can see where they are going with it. After monitoring boards during some of my internships, they can get out of control in numbers and in content. On the linked blog above, there were a couple comments made that suggest everyone should be able to comment and those mentioned in the article should be noted so.

I was always an advocate for a user ranking system, sort of like Yahoo Answers or system similar to that which the Naples Daily News uses. In both situations users are able to vote comments up or down. If a comment receives so many negative votes, it is blocked out, but not deleted. A user has to consciously click "view" to view the comment. I am not sure why more media outlets do not use such a system. While it is not full proof, it does assist with a great deal of the monitoring, well, at least more than an automated system that tries to deny in appropriate language.

Google's system does add to a story. It takes what is a journalist "conversation" potentially into a debate, but as one person mentioned in a comment on the blog, the comments become less genuine and can come of PR-ish.