14 DAY TRIAL // The Comments feature that Google added to its News service was launched a couple of months back, and allows people mentioned in a particular story to comment on the respective articles. That's basically giving a voice to anybody worth hearing and making every version of the story very easily accessible. There's no better way to make the various perspectives available to Google News readers.
There's been an update for the Comments feature that was rolled out on Friday, which included several smaller additions. In the order they were mentioned on the Official Google News blog by three members of the Comments team, the most important for the readers is the link included, redirecting to all of the expert comments. Like I mentioned above, this gives Google News users an inside scoop where there is one to be had.
A contact form has also been created for those on the other end of the discussions, those actively involved in the stories. The form will make it easier for comments to be submitted, expediting the process. Like the original announcement said, at the moment only people mentioned in the articles or those related to an organization mentioned are allowed to post. Impersonating will be rather difficult to accomplish due to the number of fields required for submitting a comment, but not impossible. However, the License Grant looks rather scary: "By submitting this comment, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to copyrights, rights of publicity, and any other legal rights necessary to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute the comment." While that is something that was to be expected, it still sounds pompous. "Finally, you confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license," the Grant finishes, making you directly responsible for anything you post. And as recent history has taught us, there's no escaping from a scorn Google. It knows your net surfing preferences and your IP, so impersonating isn't really such a good idea after all.