To identify the most popular discussions on The Economist's Web site, the newspaper launched "The Conversation Cloud" feature yesterday, BtoBonline reported.

This new feature aggregates comments posted on articles, blogs and debates on the Web site along with readers' opinions on different subjects, to transform the site into a global social hub for intelligent debate and discussions. This tool allows users to easily find the most debated topics by displaying a word cloud containing keywords related to the most widely discussed subjects on the site. There, users can click on the comments displayed and then be directed to click-through links to read the full article, NewMediaAge reported.
"The idea of The Conversation Cloud is to allow readers to better navigate through conversations and to encourage and facilitate intellectual conversation between readers. Making The Economist Online more social is part of the site's transformation into the global hub for intelligent debate and discussion," said Ron Diorio, vice president of product and community development at The Economist, according to MediaBistro.

The way in which people find content and decide what to read is changing as the Web changes, said Sam Kumar, UK digital advertising manager for The Economist Online, according to NMA. "Our research found people will read the comments before an article to decide whether it's interesting enough, and this tool is a direct result."

The Economist online edition receives an average 25,000 comments per month, according to BtoBonline. The ad funded tool running on every page of the news site is created by digital agency Jodange and will be sponsored by Logica for the next three months.