Comments on Google News

About a month ago, Simon wrote about Google News allowing people to comment on news stories linked from their news page. I rely on Google News to gather stories for me to read, and have been seeing these comments show up over the last few weeks.

Some of the comments add value to the content in the stories. For instance:

• Congressman Vito Fossella comments on a story about a bill in New York addressing the health care issues caused by toxins from the 9/11 site.
• A Princeton paleontologist comments on a story about an asteroid that may have contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs.
• A clinic lawyer comments on a story about an Iowa court decision to overturn a prohibition on gay marriage.

The comments seem to be a mix between those of interested observers (scientists, lawyers, leaders of NGOs, etc.) and PR efforts (a comment by the President of the Houston Museum of Natural History on a new exhibit). It also seems to be popular among politicians – this morning’s page of commented stories includes submissions by John Edwards (on a Bush transportation initiative) and Mitt Romney (on the Iowa gay marriage case).

Google writes that all comments are from people or organizations written about in the news stories and that Google verifies a contributor’s identity before the comment goes live.

Apparently one thing that is missing, though, is a delete function for authors experiencing some regret.