comments

Comments are the backbone of the social web. Everything is going social if it has not already been that way for some time. Why is that? People are social by nature. It's how we communicate. It's how we learn. It's how we teach. Do you find comments to be valuable resources? Share your thoughts.

Google has launched an enhanced version of its comments gadget for Google Friend Connect. With the gadget, users can easily translate comments that aren't in their language native.

Google is not not not building a social network. Really. They’re not. They’re just adding features to every product ever made to enable you to communicate and otherwise share information among your peer group and store all your information in a centralized place. That’s soooo not a social network, so I don’t need anybody telling me about how Google Reader’s new comment feature shows that they’re a social network.

Yesterday, Facebook held a press conference call, put out a press release, and published a blog post as it gave users a voice in the recasting of the site's terms of use.  Today, although there hasn't been quite as much noise, the social network found another way to demonstrate that it's interested in people's opinions. 

YouTube has just initiated a feature that allows users who leave comments on videos to delete those comments. Now when you put your foot in your mouth, you can take it back out. "Whether you misspelled 'pwned', back in the day when you were just a n00b to the internets, or you simply said something you wish you could take back - now you can remove your commentary at any time," says a post from the YouTube Team.

Here's a head-scratcher with a deceptively obvious answer: When a person comments on a blog or website, who owns, or owns the rights to, that comment? Is it the commenter or the blog/website publisher? It's a trickier question than you might think.

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.

Along with several other bloggers, I saw a post at Silicon Alley Insider the other day about the New York Times highlighting reader comments on its front page — in this case, underneath a photo of Al Gore after he won the Nobel Peace Prize.