Google is going to give those people or companies quoted in reports a chance to fire back. This NYT story has some other interesting stuff about news aggregation and the value of comment.
Walt Riker, the vice president for communications at McDonald’s, was asked to weigh in on a study from Stanford showing that the company’s marketing was so ingrained in the minds of preschoolers that they favored food like carrots sticks in McDonald’s wrappers over identical food without them.
In his 550-word statement posted on Google News, Mr. Riker wrote that McDonald’s listens to its customers and enthusiastically promotes milk, fruit and vegetables in its ads. “More information for more consumers is a very good thing,” he said in an interview. “We were eager to participate.”
Josh Cohen, the business product manager for Google News, said the feature is consistent with the company’s mission to bring as many news sources online as possible. He said the company would not edit any comments from sources.
Google characterized this as an experiment. Media professionals characterized it less charitably as an effort by engineers who do not understand the impracticalities of such a project on a large scale — for instance, how do you verify a source’s identity or screen for inaccurate statements? — and the potential sensory-deadening impact of long-winded statements. ...
The story also talked about the flaws and imperfections of other aggregation services:
For example, Digg.com in San Francisco lets readers vote on the articles they like the most. The frequent result is that the Digg faithful propel articles about Digg itself into the top spots.
Daylife.com in New York uses search algorithms to find photos, graphics and articles from around the Web, then organizes them onto single pages on subjects like Iraq or President Bush. But sometimes the technology trips up. The page for Amazon combines articles about the rainforest with articles about the online retailer — not exactly a credibility-enhancing tactic. (The New York Times is an investor in Daylife.)
Some of these sites see additional promise in letting readers pontificate about the articles in online discussion forums. Topix.net, a three-year-old news aggregator based in Palo Alto, Calif., repositioned itself in December by adding conversation forums for every city in the United States. The site attracts around 60,000 comments a day, and Chris Tolles, Topix’s chief executive, says he can charge twice the rate for ads on the pages with engaged readers as he can on his main news page.
“It turns out that presenting commodity news stories is not such a good business,” he said. “It’s hard to make money on a page with the top stories of the day.”
One drawback of the approach is that readers with extreme views can hijack the conversations. For that reason, last December, Yahoo closed down the chat forums related to specific articles on its news site, Yahoo News, which gets 35 million readers a month and is the most popular news site on the Web.