New York Times: Death of Osama Bin Laden: How Significant a Moment?
Friday, 6 May 2011, 15:36
Ingenious interactive captures and visualises reader sentiment: "We asked readers the following questions: Was his death significant in our war against terror? And do you have a negative or positive view of this event? Readers — 13,864 of them â…
Press Gazette: Legal bid to unmask Mail Online commenters fails
Thursday, 24 February 2011, 11:16
"A woman has failed in a bid to obtain an order forcing Mail Online to disclose the identities of two people who made comments about her on the newspaper website."
Strange Attractor: Sky News got the argument it wanted
Thursday, 4 November 2010, 19:37
Suw Charman-Anderson: "Ultimately, you get the community that your marketing deserves. If you market your forums as News Fight Club Online, you’re going to get exactly that. Asking people if they are ‘looking for an argument’ sets up an expectation in the user of extreme hostility, so they will react intemperately to the slightest thing."
Salon.com: Why I like vicious, anonymous online comments
Wednesday, 4 August 2010, 13:13
Matt Zoller Seitz: "Some media outlets have decided they've had enough of the endless juvenile trolling and hate-mongering, and have either adopted a stricter moderation policy … But for all the downsides of comments-thread anonymity, there's a major upside: It shows us the American id in all its snaggletoothed, pustulent glory, with a transparency that didn't exist before the Internet. And in its rather twisted way, that's a public service."
CNN.com: News sites reining in nasty user comments
Tuesday, 20 July 2010, 15:37
US news sites are reigning in anonymous user comments. Some interesting examples, including the paper that requires a credit card payment to confirm identity.
Roy Greenslade: US newspaper to charge website commenters
Wednesday, 14 July 2010, 09:32
"The Sun Chronicle, a Massachusetts paper, will charge would-be commenters a nominal one-off fee of 99 cents. But it has to be paid by credit card, which means providing a real name and address."
Indepenent: Why (and how) we’re changing commenting on independent.co.uk
Tuesday, 25 May 2010, 17:20
Jack Riley: "what we're trying to achieve with the new comment system is bigger than just the (admittedly excellent) [Disqus] system we're putting in place. It's about first of all letting people authenticate their commenting using systems with which they're already familiar (in Facebook's case, that's 400 million people worldwide and counting), and secondly, it's about restoring your trust in our comments section, so that some of the really great submissions we get on there rise to the top, the bad sink to the bottom, and the ugly – the spam and abuse that are an inevitable adjunct of any commenting system – don't appear at all."
Independent: A fresh start for comments on independent.co.uk
Tuesday, 25 May 2010, 17:12
Indy online editor Martin King: "Websites have been encouraging cowardice. They allow users to hide behind virtual anonymity to make hasty, ill-researched and often intemperate comments … So we have changed our logins to encourage comments from individuals or even official bodies using their Facebook or Twitter accounts – with other options for Yahoo or Open ID log-ins. There is also a Disqus option, where your account must be validated through your e-mail."
One Man and His Blog: The Paywalled Times: An Online Private Members’ Club?
Tuesday, 25 May 2010, 12:40
Adam Tinworth says lower traffic and no anonymity "opens up the possibility that what News International are actually trying to create is, in essence, a private members' club. There will be a limited number of people joining in on discussion, largely around content. They will be identifiable, and they will have paid an entrance fee to get in there. This is, in fact, a community model, just one that differs from the wide, inter-connected community model we're used to on the open web."
Press Gazette: New Times sites go live – paywall will be all or nothing
Tuesday, 25 May 2010, 10:14
"In another radical departure, the sites will only allow subscribers to comment under their real names. Those wishing to comment anonymously will have to make a case to editorial staff for doing so."
ReadWriteWeb: Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors
Monday, 26 April 2010, 06:31
RWW on the implications of Facebook Open Graph for publishers: "any site that already has social networking built in has to decide to abandon that before jumping into the Facebook Open Graph. The even worse problem is the ownership of ratings and comments. Are publishers really ready to give that up?" Also, implications for the semantic web: "What Facebook has done has a chance to make vast parts of the consumer Web including movies, books, music, events, sports, and news semantically tagged. Publishers and websites finally have a strong incentive to mark things up and get return traffic from Facebook."
Spoke Digital: Why Jeff Jarvis got it wrong
Saturday, 24 April 2010, 11:04
Ilana Fox: "Yes, comments can be written by assholes, but the majority of them aren’t. And you shouldn’t let your vision of this be clouded by the loud ones who write the most attention-seeking remarks, or insult everyone who interacts with a newspaper online"
Spoke Digital: Why Jeff Jarvis got it wrong
Saturday, 24 April 2010, 11:04
Ilana Fox: "Yes, comments can be written by assholes, but the majority of them aren’t. And you shouldn’t let your vision of this be clouded by the loud ones who write the most attention-seeking remarks, or insult everyone who interacts with a newspaper online"
Out-Law.com: High Court ruling serves as a warning against any moderation of user comments
Wednesday, 21 April 2010, 13:14
"A blog owner can avoid liability for user-generated content that appears on his site without being checked or moderated, the High Court has ruled. But fixing the spelling or grammar in users' posts could lose him that protection, it said."
