Metafilter Journalist Pages

There was an interesting discussion in Metafilter about Daylife’s experimental Source and Journalist pages. The comments are priceless, and by priceless I actually mean $5 since that is what they wanted me to pay to make a comment.  Oh well.  But it has me thinking that the “Journalist” pages should be changed to “Author”, since the former might connote a degree of professionalism and seriousness that is only appropriate for mainstream sources and a subset of the blogs.  That suggestion was made by one of my Daylife co-workers.  I would rather not have to worry about who is and is not a journalist, and use a label that covers bloggers of every stripe, although clearly some are journalists.

The other problem is that Metafilter, because of its quirky format, is getting its comments scraped along with the original post.  In some cases, for example when searching for articles and turning up Metafilter results, I’m not sure whether that is right or wrong.  Comments are more important to Metafilter than they are to The New York Times.  The authors of the comments and the author of the primary blog entry are on similar footings with respect to authority on the subject matter.  For the New York Times, the author of the article is almost always of a different caliber from the authors of the comments, and searching them should mean searching the articles and not the comments.  So clearly comments should be separated out or segregated.  In either case, however, attributing comments from the public at large to the author and using it to construct their profile is a bad thing, and we will need to change that with sources like Metafilter.

It raises a more general question.  In what cases do we scrape comments and include them in how we index and connect articles?  For mainstream news sources, we don’t.  For blogs and blog-like publications, perhaps when the posts are relatively short, and when the blog author includes them on the page with the post.