Monitoring Comments on MSM Sites

There is something of a growing trend whereby media Web sites are encouraging their readers to comment about articles directly on the the Web site. Read a story; post a comment. Makes a lot of sense.

I'm told by some colleagues in London that this is becoming particularly popular in Europe. So far I found one paper: The Guardian , which has put comments in its own area .

In The States, I found The Washington Post has comments on articles. CNet's News.com has its Talkback feature, which is a free area requiring a username. USAToday links some of its articles to its blogs area for comment.

What I'm not certain about is whether these comments are being captured by any of the blog aggregators or other search engines. Technically they aren't blogs, nor are they message boards, nor are they necessarily easily captured by the major search engines when they spider the content.

Are these comments falling into the media monitoring ether?