Comment is free, but won’t be anonymous

Saturday, 11 February 2006, 19:35

The Guardian will soon be launching Comment is Free — a new commentry blog modelled on the Huffington Post.

In his column today, assistant editor Neil Macintosh revealed that in an effort to avoid the kind of uncivil behaviour that recently forced the Washington Post to shut its blogs’s comments sections, the Guardian site will require readers to register with a valid e-mail address before being allowed to comment.

But that’s not the only feature they may be implementing to promote accountability:

We are also thinking of revealing on the site every commenter’s rough geographical location; information not exposed to the public before. Experiments on other sites suggest debates are more civil when everyone knows where everyone else is.

Interesting.

Update: One site that already uses geolocation in this way is Topix.net.

In an interview for PBS MediaShift, Topix.net chief executive Rich Skrenta told Mark Glaser:

The geolocation technology we use is 99% accurate on a country level, 80% accurate on a state level, and 75% accurate for U.S. cities. Often for a wrong city it still gets the right “neck of the woods” for a poster. It says I’m in San Francisco when I’m actually in Palo Alto. It is finding the location of the poster’s ISP, not the poster themselves, which can be surprising.

Assuming the Guardian is playing with similar geolocation tools — which are being used increasingly by advertisers and are availble on simple web statistics tools like Google Analytics and even Sitemeter — I suspect Comment is Free will find a huge contingent of commenters from Lambeth, were, judging from the geolocation feature in my own logs, many London ISPs seem to be based.

Update 2: See also Simon Waldman on the legal risks the Guardian is taking by letting commenters post directly to their web site.

Entry Filed under: Blogs, Newspapers, Online

5 Comments Add some more of your own

1. Fleet Street 2.0&hellip | 21 February 2006 at 1241

I suspect Comment is Free will find a huge contingent of commenters from Lambeth, were, judging from the geolocation feature in my own logs, many London ISPs seem to be based. A commenter on my personal blog,where this is cross-posted, explained why: The Lambeth effect is no doubt due to the fact that LINX is located in Tookey Street, SE1. LINX is the internet exchange used by many of the major Internet Service Providers. Meanwhile, the
2. Tim Worstall&hellip | 12 February 2006 at 1422

Britblog Roundup # 52

Clearly and obviousloy the most important thing in the blogosphere of these isles this past week was the fact that THE BOOK is now online in all its glory. Start here and then simply go roaming. Following the archives by
3. MatGB | 12 February 2006 at 1840

Geolocators are weird; my dial up connects me via Watford (I’m in Torquay), so I keep seeing ads for ‘hot girls in Watford’ or whatever.

Still, sounds like an interesting trick, have to see how well it does.
4. Alex | 13 February 2006 at 0818

The Lambeth effect is no doubt due to the fact that LINX is located in Tookey Street, SE1.
5. Rich Skrenta | 22 February 2006 at 1930

“Experiments on other sites” … um, well, no. We’re flattered that the Guardian is considering copying Topix’s user geolocation innovation to enhance their forum civility, but Neil should had given Topix proper attribution, instead of suggesting this idea had come to them from multiple examples. It didn’t. I expect better from newspaper editors.

I would post this on the Guardian’s own site, but they don’t have comments enabled.

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