The explosive growth of online social networking has fundamentally changed our relationship with news. It’s no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news, and share news. News has become an important element of community — something around which we gather, connect, and converse. And we can all become part of the evolution of a story now — expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view.

HuffPost Social News makes this easier and more dynamic than ever. It takes social news to a whole new level. It will turbo-charge your online conversations and connections, and allow you to build and develop a community that follows what you read and care about.

Given that HuffPost attracted over 1.7 million user comments last month alone, it seems that the site has had a social strategy for quite some time, albeit a somewhat haphazard one. Will traditional news outlets take notice?

via Arianna Huffington: Your HuffPost Experience Is About to Get A Lot More Social!.