WebProNews

Google News started allowing experts to comment on articles about seven months ago, but it's highly unlikely that the average person knows this.  The simple reason: the comments are rare and hard to find.  A new feature solves half of this problem by gathering all the comments in a single place.

 Google's News Comments

A fresh link on the Google News homepage is called, simply enough, "Comments by People in the News."  Click on it - it's located just below the "Top Stories" section - and you'll be shown a list of comments, along with their respective authors.

This link is liable to increase both the profile and the popularity of Google News's Comments system among readers.  It may also, in turn, result in an increased number of comments, and should that happen, Google's got something at the ready.

On the Google News Blog, Cliff, Ted, and Namita ("the Comments Team") write, "[T]o make it easier for commentors to submit comments, we've created a contact form to expedite this process.  Currently, the ability to comment is only open to people who have been mentioned in a story or are related to an organization mentioned in a story.  This form will make it easier for us to gather the information we need from them to get their comments into Google News as quickly as possible."

It's a shame the phrase "as quickly as possible" didn't apply to these updates, as well; seven months ago would have been a better time to release them.  Still, no major competitors have beaten Google in the meantime, and it'll be interesting to see what happens with Google News's Comments from now on.