One of the most common questions we get from readers is about how they can post comments directly online to columns, editorials and letters to the editor. “Why do I have to visit the blog and comment there? What if no one has posted anything about today’s editorial? What am I to do?

Well, some Internet geniuses who know which levers to pull and which buttons to press made it happen last week. Readers now have the ability to comment on - and recommend - stories, columns, articles and editorials across DallasNews.com.

This is especially exciting for the Editorial and Viewpoints pages. You see, our pages — the ones produced by those of us in the Editorial Department — were interactive before interactive was cool. (We launched the nation’s first newspaper editorial board blog in 2003.) Now we’re taking that interactivity to a new level.

Consider this: Letters to the editor remain a popular feature in our newspaper - almost any daily newspaper, for that matter. Last week, for example, we received 806 letters from readers.

But we also received 730 comments on our blog. And now, with this new comments tool on our Web site — get this — DallasNews.com received 2,047 comments on stories.

We now have three direct and varied ways to interact with the news and opinion produced and packaged by The Dallas Morning News – letters, blogging and comments.

And here’s the cool part. If you comment, when thousands of your fellow North Texans forward an editorial to their friends, your comment might be there right there, next to our opinion.

We’re making some changes to take full advantage of this new commenting tool. For example, we used to publish all of our letters to the editor in one block each day. When I went to a journalism conference and showed them our “Letters from Tuesday” and “Letters from Wednesday” approach, my peers asked a great question: Who would want to read that? Why not give each letter its own headline, pegged to the letter writer’s topic instead of to the day of publication?

Good questions. Letters are popular online - tens of thousands of people click on those pages every week. But now when they visit our letters page, they will see individual letters. And, more important, they can share and comment on individual letters. That makes getting a letter chosen a bit more of an exciting proposition. You never know when your letter might be the top item on Yahoo or Google search pages.

Another question we hear frequently about comments is “How will you keep idiots like my cousin Larry from being a big jerk on the comments page?”

One important part of the answer is that we need your help. Anywhere you see comments online — on our blogs or on our other pages — you will see a button that allows you to report objectionable material. Don’t be shy. A forum is only as good as the people make it.

It’s a new era in news and information. And you have a role to play. We look forward to hearing from you. Start now … see that blank box just below my name? I’ve had my say. That’s where you can have yours.

Michael Landauer is The News' assistant editorial page editor for Community Opinions. His e-mail address is mlandauer@dallasnews.com