Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0 has a fascinating interview with Arianna Huffington from The Huffington Post on their recent decision to allow their top Commenters to Bloggers on the site.
The idea is pretty simple – Paul Berry explains in the announcement post:
“Reading through the comments on our site, we realized that our commenters are a tremendous — and underutilized — resource. So we’ve created a process whereby we will choose one commenter a month to become part of our group blog.”
Commenters are chosen as a result of the ratings that other readers of the blog give their comments and as a result of moderators preferences.
It’s an interesting system and one I’m sure we’ll see other high profile blogs and news outlets experiment with.
Why not? I see paragraphs (if not full blog posts) in comments sometimes. And the HuffPost comments gets to be a lot.
Why not express your opinion via your own forum? :)
That’s a really great idea. I personally allow anyone to make posts on my website, but they have to be okayed by me before they are published. I wonder if they do the same or allow the commenter full access?
I wonder what tools they are using to create the comment rating? It will be interesting to see how it works for them.
I think the comments section of big, high quality blogs must be an absolute pool of undiscovered talent. It reminds me of the way software companies often hire people who’ve made unofficial hacks and addons to their products. It just makes a lot of sense, and I think it’s something we’re going to see a lot more of.
I have to agree with Dan Cole. While allowing comments to be made from almost anyone/have a public site – it has become necessary to moderate comments because of the “spam” comment explosion.
But all in all I think its a great idea, good for publicity if that is what the commenter is looking for and could possibly open up a paid writing gig or 2
The Huffington Blog has so many people working on it, I don’t think they really care about SPAM. They are top 5 in Technorati.
What a great idea!
I think it is an amazing idea. The commmenters obviously have a strong opinion about what the blog talks about otherwise they wouldn’t be commenting. I think it was a brilliant idea and I agree that you will be seeing it more often.
When and if I start having guest bloggers blog on my blog (that was repetitive) I will aproach my top commenters first.
That rocks, what a good idea. I remember getting linked to by HuffPo, that was cool :)
Very cool idea.