The Huffington Post's community of users has been one of the keys to our site's success. Since launching in May 2005, we've received more than 2.7 million comments, posted by over 115,000 commenters. Our commenters have been active and engaged writers -- and now they have the chance to become a featured HuffPost blogger.
Reading through the comments on our site, we realized that our commenters are a tremendous -- and underutilized -- resource. So we've created a process whereby we will choose one commenter a month to become part of our group blog.
Our decision will be based on how many fans a commenter has, how often their comment is selected as a Favorite, and our moderators' preferences. Every comment now has an "I'm A Fan Of" link and a "Favorite" link, so start voting for the comments and commenters you like best. We will announce the first commenter-turned-HuffPost-blogger in the next few weeks.
If you haven't explored our new comment system yet, please give it a spin. You will find that comments are now threaded to facilitate better discussions, that they appear on the site faster, and that abusive comments are easier for us to find and delete. We've also added a commenter profile page, which includes a bio of the commenter and lists all the comments they've posted.
Our new comment system also allows us to better moderate discussions. So even if you are not an active commenter, we encourage you to log-in and use the system to flag abusive comments, to mark your favorites, and to help us decide which commenters become HuffPost bloggers.