I just signed-up for the Reuters InterActive Community - an interesting debut for the news vendor and its attempts to create a social community around news topics. Built on the Blogtronix platform, it seemed interesting enough to consider becoming a member.

Similar to my views on the Topix.net site, I think its a great idea that will hopefully foster a community of interaction between citizen journalists and established media types like Reuters.

I noticed a couple of things that might put off the Web 2.0 crowd. The first is that it seems you can't register with a yahoo, gmail, or msn email account. I had to use my corporate email account. I guess the question I take away from this is whether they are looking for interaction and engagement to occur strictly within the corporate community? My hunch is that they might get a few people complaining about it, or worse, not bother to sign-up.

The other was with the email I received upon signing-up:

Thank you for registering with Reuters InterActive. We will review your details and get back to you within 48 hours.

This process is in place to protect the integrity of the Reuters InterActive Community.

An email will be sent to you when the review is complete.

It made me wonder how an email address could possibly help them to determine any level of "honesty" or "integrity." I guess what they mean to say is that they want to reduce any incidences of fake or anonymous posters trying to subvert the media or topics being discussed. Despite the blunders and controls to sanitize the community discussion, I think that like any experiment they need time to figure out what works and what doesn't. I'm interested to see how this new community works and grows.