As we were trolling Google news looking for stuff to post up to our favorite social networking site Yasvs, we ran across our first Google comments on Senator Craig’s bust in a sex sting as he hit up a undercover cop in a bathroom.

While senator Craig has to work out his own issues on this one, the more interesting part is that the first Google comments have shown up for this article from Melanie Sloan, part of a citizen watch dog group “Citizens for responsibility and ethics in Washington”. As well as one by Kelly McBride from the Poynter Institute. Both comments were posted yesterday.

With the usual Google disclaimer that they are not responsible for comments, the question about all this is that neither of these people are involved, but obviously are going to use this to do their own political agenda or spin on the article much as was predicted by many people on how this whole thing will work out.

It is great that two comments from large organizations have shown up, and depending on how they are archived and stored, this will be an excellent test case in data retention on the internet, surfing for people’s names, and otherwise how people maintain their own public persona on line.

We talked about the concept of user comments in Google news here and here. It is great that they have started showing up now, and depending on how this experiment works, it will be even more interesting to see the long term effects of this on people who read the news, and how people manage to work their own agendas and spin into various news articles.