Ha! They did it…USA Today refashioned themselves a Social Network and allow anyone to comment on ANY STORY …and that comment will appear.  That's a major jump.  Well.. you may still need to email you comment to the editors at USA Today - so there's still editorial control.

According to Steve Rubel:

"…USA Today is unveiling a massive overhaul of their web site that adds a number of great features. The notable additions include: reader comments on every story, the ability to create a profile page that can be shared with others, citizen journalist photos, story tagging and digg-like recommendation buttons.

This is exactly the direction USA Today needs to follow. However, it doesn't go quite far enough. In addition to building these features, the media need to bridge their communities to the ones where we already spend our time. RSS, widgets and embedded content would help here. For example, USA Today should let us add our blog, Twitter or Facebook feeds or even embedded YouTube vids to our profile pages. "

Oh Boy…it's just a matter of time before the Next Crop of SEO experts appears with "driving traffic to your site" by commenting on News Stories and OP-ED's at the major online newspapers.

Why…I bet it will come up in Panel at SES next month.. But it's also good to have a two way conversation with Main Stream Media….it's good fore everyone .. and, like I say…it's probably good for your SEO - even if the newspapers tell Search Engines to come up with a "nofollow tag" from Newspaper links…even then it will still help.   But to help the most, you'll want to be one of the first to comment on a story as  not many people will read past the first 10 comments - that's my guess.