For the past few months, the Huffington Post has been on a bit of a tear–both in terms of traffic gains and in its hiring of some big talent for key positions.

Now, those execs are focusing on using that consumer momentum to achieve what has eluded the Huffington Post thus far: Making some serious bank from the privately held news and media site.

Here’s a chat I had with new President and Chief Revenue Officer Greg Coleman about how he is aiming to do just that.

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In the ongoing game of Internet exec musical chairs, Greg Coleman, who has been a top exec at both Yahoo and AOL, is poised to become president of the Huffington Post, as well as chief revenue officer, several sources said.

The deal for Coleman to come on board at the privately held online news site–which has grown significantly over the last year and just added well-known online media exec Eric Hippeau as CEO–came together only recently.

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In an unusually robust collaboration using Facebook Connect, the Huffington Post is launching a feature on Monday called “HuffPost Social News,” which lets readers create a personalized social networking-like news page on the Huffington Post itself.

While the Huffington Post had already been using Facebook Connect since January–which allows readers of the site to log in using their Facebook identity to interact, which is mostly used to leave comments–this essentially takes Facebook Connect and puts it on steroids.

While the use of “social news” will be seen by some as simply a clever PR term, it is an interesting development for both the popular online news site and for the social networking giant.

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It’s an opportune time to see this interview, in which Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth and Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington talked about the future of the news media.

The pair were interviewed at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference only a month before Weymouth landed in hot water for trying to organize an off-the-record gathering of D.C. power players and journalists at her house, underwritten by sponsors.

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Huffington Post co-founder and blogging diva Arianna Huffington was in Berkeley this past weekend keynoting at the Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp 2009.

So, BoomTown took the opportunity to motor over the Bay Bridge to catch Huffington on video between sessions about all the big changes at the news Web site of late, including a new CEO and local New York site.

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Apparently, if you want to think about the growth of the Huffington Post as a culinary dish, perhaps today’s replacement of CEO Betsy Morgan with longtime online media powerhouse Eric Hippeau might appear under the Emeril Lagasse cooking cliché: Let’s kick it up a notch!

Both co-founders of the online media site, Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, said as much in interviews I did with them–as well as Hippeau–this afternoon.

“The deal is that we simply have been growing so fast that we needed more firepower to accelerate in expanding the site and monetizing it,” said Huffington, who is also editor-in-chief of the news site.

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Hey, politicians aren’t the only ones who get to do fancy polls!

Walt and I had a bunch of them about a variety of tech topics that we pulled out to ambush, ooops, pose to speakers at our seventh D: All Things Digital conference last week, which we commissioned from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates.

Check our our lovely graphs here.

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Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

Well, we’re still going–making the same long-term bet that the digital revolution will keep rolling as we did at D1. Here’s our lineup for D7.

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While in Los Angeles today at the AlwaysOn OnHollywood conference, BoomTown ran smack into blogging empress Arianna Huffington.

She was there to give a speech called “Video Killed the Radio Star…But Can the Web Actually Save Journalism?”

Her answer was a decided yes, especially with great journalists working online, such as the new managing editor of the Huffington Post the mega-blog has just hired.

That would be former CNET Networks Editor-in-Chief Jai Singh, who quit the company last year after a dozen-year run.

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BoomTown’s visit to Italy has been eye-opening in a lot of ways, not the least of which is to be reminded that not everyone in the world is jacked into the matrix 24/7.

In other words, Julius Caesar conquered Rome, but Twitter definitely has not.

In fact, the conference being held here is aptly called “Tutto Cambio, Cambiamo Tutto?” That roughly translates into “Everything changes, let’s change everything?”

This is not a question that is much asked in Silicon Valley. But here, whether or not to change is much more of a debate–one in which change does not always come out on top.

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BoomTown is winging toward Italy this weekend to participate in an interesting gathering about digital and other issues related to innovation.

The once-every-seven-year conference focuses on disruption and change, with the event titled: “Tutto cambia? Cambiamo tutto?”

That roughly translates to: Everything changes. But do we change everything?”

Si, cari i miei geek italiani!

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Ok, not that secret a project.

BoomTown has known about it forever and Radar Online gave the lowdown about the creation of the hip-sounding news aggregator Web site–headed by high-profile editor Tina Brown–by Barry Diller’s IAC in a report in early April.

While still in its planning stages, though, it just hired a new GM to run the business: Caroline Marks.

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Could it be a digital indicator that the Blue states are taking back ground from the Red ones–at least in cyberspace?

In February, for the first time ever, Arianna Huffington’s liberal political mega-blog and news site, the Huffington Post, has apparently surpassed the longtime mighty blog leader, Matt Drudge of the conservative/populist-leaning Drudge Report, according to recent traffic data reports from both comScore and Nielsen Online.

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Yesterday, we slapped around VC Fred Wilson in our ongoing efforts to overtake him in our increasingly annoying journey to extract donors and dollars from geeks for a charity called DonorsChoose.org.

It’s working! We’re now hovering near $10,000 with 35 donors and solidly in the No. 2 slot, although Wilson does march on like Sherman to [...]

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Last night, Arianna Huffington appeared at the Women of Silicon Valley dinner reception, a regular gathering that has been organized by top Google executive Sheryl Sandberg at her Atherton, Calif., home.

The event features a wide range of speakers, all women so far, talking to a broad swath of typically high-ranking women technology executives from Internet, [...]

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