Michelangelo Signorile has been named The Huffington Post Gay Voices new Editor-at-Large. Signorile is a former Editor-at-Large for The Advocate and Out, and hosts a radio show on Sirius XM’s LGBT channel during the week.

“We’re delighted to welcome Michelangelo Signorile to the HuffPost team,” said Arianna Huffington. “He has his finger on the pulse of the issues that matter to the LGBT community, knows how to start provocative, enlightening conversations, and his engaging, plugged-in and fast-moving sensibility is perfect for the web.”

Signorile will work closely with Noah Michelson, the Editor-in-Chief of Gay Voices, on the editorial direction of the site.

The Huffington Post is expanding once again, this time launching four new verticals: HuffPost/50, for the 50-and-over crowd; HuffPost Gay Voices, for happy content only (we think); HuffPost Weddings, for everything one needs to get married; and HuffPost High School, for all the Justin Bieber pics teenagers can handle.

If it seems like HuffPost launches a new site every day, that’s because it practically does. There have been 21 new sites launched since AOL and The Huffington Post merged in March. The growth isn’t even hurting the brand. Check out these stats: In August, HuffPost recorded 37 million unique visitors and passed one billion total page views — both for the first time. Oh, and people still love to talk on the site. There were over five million comments in August as well.

With traffic increasing, it’s no wonder the site launches verticals as often as Nicki Minaj gets a new weave. We’re sure there will be plenty more to come.

Emily Peck, a writer for the Wall Street Journal since 2007, is leaving to become Managing Editor of AOL/The Huffington Post’s Money and Finance section. She was most recently Management and Careers Editor for the Journal. At her new position, Peck will oversee Daily Finance, Real Estate and Jobs operations.

Via a memo obtained by Poynter, Peter Goodman said that Peck will boost the already successful verticals. “Emily’s hiring represents our commitment to continue elevating and expanding these three vital, high-traffic sites that collectively help our readers unravel the real life issues of home, job and money,” said Goodman.

The AOL Huffington Post Media Group has expanded yet again this morning, this time launching Huffington Post Small Business. As you can tell by the name, the site hopes to offer readers analysis of the many issues facing small business owners. Rod Kurtz is the site’s Executive Editor.

Peter Goodman, Executive Business Editor of AOL Huffington Post Media Group, said that the new site is filling a void.

“Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy, and the key source of job growth,” explained Goodman. “Our site aims to crystallize a crucial conversation about what they need to prosper. We will spotlight what is working and amplify concerns about what is impeding the growth so sorely needed.”

Stay tuned for tomorrow when HuffPost launches HuffPost Wings, which will detail every aspect of the show “Wings.” Then next Tuesday, HuffPost is expected to launch HuffPost Kid Rock, a site dedicated to explaining how the Detroit native got people to purchase his music.

There’s more HuffPost sites coming, but that’s all we have confirmed for now.

UPDATE: Apparently this isn’t exactly something new. Jeff Bercovici of Forbes just tweeted to us that there was already a HuffPost small business site, and then Adam Clark Estes of The Atlantic Wire said that he helped launch a small business subsection for HuffPost last year. You’d think HuffPost would mention these details, but alas.

Today The Huffington Post launched its newest vertical – BlackVoices. The site, according to Arianna Huffington, is designed to showcase the black person’s perspective on everything, big to small.

“We are living in a split-screen world – depending on what part of the screen you are looking at, you will have a very different perception of where things stand,” explained Huffington, in her welcoming post on the site. “HuffPost BlackVoices plans to cover both sides of the screen, from crushing unemployment on one side, to the best and brightest black innovators, thinkers and cultural game changers on the other.”

Christina Norman, who was recently ousted as CEO of Oprah’s OWN, is BlackVoices Executive Editor. She echoed Huffington, “What’s especially exciting for me is that we’ll be bringing HuffPost’s unique approach to building passionate communities to content that speaks particularly to African-Americans – whether it’s Beyonce’s new look or a new book that’s making waves.”

The site has plenty of prominent black writers, leaders and influencers contributing content. Heidi Durrow, Michael Steele, John Legend, Al Sharpton, Amy DuBois Barnett, Kamala Harris, Henry Louis Gates, Trey Ellis and Mellody Hobson are all going to appear on BlackVoices.

Myles Miller, a 17-year-old from the Bronx who was once deemed president material by Bloomberg’s office, has been named Associate Editor for The Huffington Post’s upcoming high school vertical. Miller certainly has the chops for the job – he’s already worked for CBS’ “Early Show,” and covered the inauguration of Barack Obama, among a slew of other things.

The New York Observer reports that there aren’t many details about the new site, but that it would feature content by high schoolers and be targeted toward that audience.

The Huffington Post attracts a lot of visitors, mostly with promises of celebrities in bikinis and important news items, like the top 10 party colleges (congrats Buckeyes Bobcats! And sorry to parents of Ohio State University students). We’re joking, of course. The site does have quality journalism, and on top of that – plenty of user interaction.

As evidence of that, Mashable reports that last weekend HuffPo registered its 100 millionth comment. Arianna Huffington credits the achievement to the site’s ability to present users with relevant comments and a unique comment filtering system:

HuffPo employs 30 human moderators who work alongside ‘Julia,’ a backend moderator that algorithmically filters out comments that don’t belong on the site. They keep trolls and offensive remarks out of the comment sections and work to quickly approve posts so that there isn’t a long gap between submitting a comment and it appearing on the site.

No word on how many of the 100 million comments actually make any sense, but hey, this is the Internet, contributing something worthwhile to an article has no place here.

According to a Patch editor, the model of “all local, all the time,” might not be working for the hyperlocal news network. The editor told Streetfight that in 3Q, The Huffington Post model of writing about whatever gets the most clicks (even if it’s not local) is going to take hold:

Now while we wait for the budgets for the new quarter it looks like it will bring more emphasis on ‘trending topics’ and tailoring content to what people Web-wide are searching for, not necessarily what is going on in our Patch. The Huffington Post influence is gently suggesting adding this content to drive UVs.

The Patch editor added that the sites have begun taking national ads, whereas before, it focused almost exclusively on local advertisers.

If this is all true, how does Patch last? Its entire brand is about local. No one is going to Patch for general interest stories, there’s already plenty of places online that do the exact same thing. Which means that those national advertisers aren’t going to get the clicks that they desire. Perhaps this editor is exaggerating a bit. But if he isn’t, Patch seems to be having quite an identity crisis.

If you block it, will they come? That’s a question Tim Armstong, the CEO of AOL, might be facing pretty soon. He told Bloomberg News that AOL and The Huffington Post might launch premium versions of content – in other words, the future of those sites might be found behind a paywall.

In an interview at the Cannes Lion media conference, Armstrong explained that asking readers to pay for some editorial work on the site is something worth exploring.

He said that AOL and HuffPo are “open in the future to strategies that will help create great content and monetize it properly,” and added “I think content subscriptions on the Internet can be a very viable business.” According to Bloomberg, Armstrong indicated that the first step to launching subscription-based content would probably involve AOL’s business-to-business sites, such as the one that provides news to the defense industry.

It’s certainly a smart idea to test this out with b-to-b sites, because we’re a little skeptical that people will be willing to pay for AOL or HuffPo content. Okay, a lot skeptical. Okay we don’t actually believe anybody will. There. We said it.

We certainly hope you have better/less creepy things to do today than scour through the emails Sarah Palin sent and received while governor of Alaska. FishbowlNY suggests finally figuring out the name of “the other guy” in Wham! or baking us some cookies. If those ideas don’t entice you like Palin’s correspondence, you should head to The Huffington Post, because it’s providing live updates on the emails right now.

Here’s our favorite so far:

On Feb. 19, 2007, deputy legislative director Chris Clark recommended to Palin that she meet Pete Rouse, ‘who’s now chief of staff for some guy named Barack Obama,’ when she was in Washington, D.C. on an upcoming trip.

Palin’s reply: ‘I’m game to meet him.’

It’s worth noting that Obama announced he was running for president on Feb. 10 – so this email was either incredibly close-minded, or sarcastic.

Who knows what the email meant, what really matters is that everyone is being incredibly weird about searching them. If you’re okay with that, knock yourself out and head to the HuffPo’s live-blog.