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The newest feature on Google News - comments solicited from participants in a news story - won't be part of anyone else's news.

Don't Try Crawling Google News Comments

When AOL broke down its subscriber walls, it looked like the end of walled garden content models on the Internet. They have been coming back in some ways, Facebook being one less-restrictive example.

Google News doesn't seem like the place to find high walls and ivy creeping up the bricks. TechCrunch thinks it is, citing Techmeme's Gabe Rivera about the policy for comments on Google News:

One thing that bugs me: they’re now hosting original news content, yet they prohibit other aggregators from crawling it (per robots.txt restrictions and TOS). Of course Google News relies on the openness of other organizations with original news content.

Cynthia Brumfield at IP Democracy showed how determining news participants promises a whole bunch of headaches for whoever ends up doing the verification of comments and commenters:

Here is Google’s sole criterion for who can post a comment on a news article: “We want to hear from anyone who has been mentioned in a news story.”

Hmm….really, anyone? How about an article that discusses, say, major litigation surrounding who owns the patent for MP3 technology? This article might mention, for example, many entities that lay claim to inventing the technology, including Microsoft, Alcatel-Lucent, AT&T, Thomson, Royal Philips, Fraunhofer Society of Germany and Texas MP3 Technologies.

But wouldn't that be a good thing, to have that kind of participation from all of the parties involved? Even with that participation, if it can't be accessed for redistribution similar to what Google News does for news publishers, the commenting feature loses a lot of utility.

The policy runs counter to Google’s stated aims of organizing content and making it useful. As a new feature, Google could change it, but we don't think they will. Licensing agreements they have with news organizations like AP and AFP probably keep Google from allowing the news content they index to be indexed by others.

Techmeme probably shouldn't hold its breath waiting for a change in policy on Google News.