Finally a solution to the problem of inane comments on websites. Thanks to the wonderful xkcd.com

One of the final presentations at ISOJ looked at the content of comments. The study, Comments in News, Democracy Booster or Journalistic Nightmare (PDF), analysed comments on newspaper websites in Catalunya in Spain David Domingo, Universitat Rovira i Virgilli (Tarragona, explained that the analysis was based on Habermas: were comments an expression of a democratic debate, expressing logical and coherent arguments. Most users only left one comment in a debate.

Image via Wikipedia There’s somewhat of a contradiction in the latest posting on the BBC’s Editors Blog by Helen Boaden, director of BBC News. Introducing the post, she writes: This week I gave the keynote speech at the e-Democracy conference. You can read what I said below. I would be interested to know what you think. The speech gives an overview of the BBC’s approach to citizen journalism. But even

Preliminary research presented at the Convergence and Society conference in South Carolina suggests that comments on a news story affect the perception of bias in the story itself. Michele Jones, a Phd student at the University of North Carolina, wanted to investigate the impact that comments had on credibility and reader perception of bias in the news She conducted an online experiment with 76 participants reading a story about abortion