The mess at the Washington Post over reader comments on the Post’s editors’ blog ought to remind all online publishers that managing reader interactivity is not easy.

The mess started when ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote, in her Jan. 15 column about the U.S. government scandal revolving around lobbyist Jack Abramoff, that “a number of Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) and Sen. Byron Dorgan (N.D.), have gotten Abramoff campaign money.”

That wasn’t true. All of Abramoff’s direct contributions went to Republicans. And readers used the comment function on the Post editors’ blog to point that out. Howell later clarified her remarks, writing that “a better way to have said it would be that Abramoff ‘directed’ contributions to both parties.”

But the avalanche of responses against Howell’s column prompted the Post to shut down the comments function on the editor’s blog. (Comments remain enabled on the Post’s many other blogs.) Washingpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady wrote that “a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow” rules against “personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech” in justifying the decision. But some bloggers disputed whether the comments went over the line.

Managing a discussion community requires much more than turning on a comment function and hoping for the best. The uproar over Howell’s error exposes the deep anger felt by many Americans toward its current government leadership and what those Americans perceive to be the press’s failure to cover the government with appropriate skepticism.

Yes, readers who become abusive or profane ought to be cut off. But those who do not ought to be heard, and not cut off with the others.

People need to vent. The Post, and other online news outlets, would do better to let them vent, then to engage those readers to discover the source of their anger and frustration — not to shut off their medium for speaking.

You’ve got one-twentieth of a second to grab a first-time visitor to your website, according to a new study published in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology.

BBC News reports that conclusions drawn about the aesthetic appeal of websites by users who looked at those sites for just 50 milliseconds closely matched those drawn by other users who looked at the sites for longer periods.

“Unless the first impression is favourable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” lead researcher Gitte Lindgaard of Canada’s Carleton University, told the BBC.

No pressure there….

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia‘s taken well-deserved hits recently for its bogus entry on a friend of the Kennedy family. But readers need proper context for such criticism. If a publication makes a mistake (which, eventually, we all do), how does its error rate compare with those of others?

The journal Nature this week provides a partial answer. In its investigation, Nature asked leading scientists to examine articles on Wikipedia and in Encyclopaedia Britannica on a variety of science topics. In the 42 articles examined, researchers found 162 errors, omissions or misleading statements in the Wikipedia entries, with 123 in Britannica. Yet the researchers categorized just eight errors as serious – and those were evenly split, with four in Wikipedia and four in Britannica.

The investigation demonstrates, once again, that Wikipedia is not a perfect source of 100-percent accurate information. But neither is Encyclopaedia Britannica. That Wikipedia was able to perform as well as Brittanica in avoid serious errors on difficult scientific content provides a strong endorsement for the concept of getting good information by letting readers collectively write and edit it.