Blog Comments Contain Unmined Gold

In his 2006 Trends Part I: Comment Search, Steve Rubel hits on something I'd really like to have been able to do yesterday -- comments mining:

"...what we all need is a way to search the entire conversation.... what will be the next great land grab - mining comments. Blog comments have perhaps more collective wisdom inside them than any other form of consumer generated content."

Without the ability to mine comments, I came across the following only by chance. I wonder how many others missed this interesting exchange:   

In yesterday's post, Niall Cook asks whether posting private e-mails without the original sender's permission is legal and ethical. He doesn't reference anyone in particular, but takes a stance by saying, "Regardless of the legal position, I don't think it's particularly ethical."

In the first comment, Trevor Cook asks Niall why he didn't link directly to "my offending post and then people could have judged in context..." Niall responds by saying, "I didn't link to your post because I was raising a generic question....I was not trying to call anyone out."

Trevor then makes the following point: "If I'm talking to a journalist and I want to be off the record then I specifically state it in advance. I think people sending emails to bloggers ought to specify that they don't want publication. Lots of people do that and I always respect their wishes."

Others also add important points to the conversation (Eric Weaver asks, "are we to the point where any text sent to any other person is fair game for public display?" and Susan Hales says, "I... elicited many informative emails from viewers on the topic of my website and I've wanted to post some of the emails but can't figure out a good way to do it."), so go read the entire thread yourself. 

Trevor also responds to Niall on his own blog, which adds an interesting twist to the exchange.

Comments

[Ed Kohler]

One trick with comments search is they aren't rated the way normal blog posts are. This may make it more difficult to find content that's worth reading.

One way to deal with this is to rank comments from moderated blogs higher, since they were at least good enough to approve. However, I don't know how blog search engines could determine which comments are moderated.

[Andrea Weckerle]

Ed, going the moderated route is one option, but even unmoderated blogs can "approve" comments by deleting offensive or inappropriate material later on. I believe the technology will follow after a big story (probably political) bursts forth from a blog comment. For me, though, it's not soon enough; I spend quite a bit of time wading through comments one-by-one and would love some short-cut.