Google News Adds Unique Commenting Feature; No Fabio

Google is adding an already controversial new feature to Google News: allowing people to comment on news items, but only those who are actually featured in the news story. Plenty of people are thinking about Google’s reasoning for this, the competitive advantage it could give them, and trying to figure out how Google will verify the identity of commentors.

Michael Arrington is a bit upset that Google will not allow others to crawl these comments, event though Google News itself is the product of Google crawling other news sources.

Personally, I think that Google should add a different form of commenting, where Fabio comments on news stories. It would be interesting to hear his viewpoints, and to see if he refers to himself in the third person.

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