Earlier this year, LinkedIn started offering a news sharing feature. Now any user that clicks through an article shared on a LinkedIn group will be able to share and comment directly from the news article.

"We've received a ton of great feedback on the feature, with some of our users mentioning how inconvenient it was to participate in a group conversation given the additional step of returning to the news discussion page to leave a comment," says Jen Granito on the LinkedIn blog. "We're now incorporating some of these suggestions we gathered, starting with the ActionBar."

Users can now also discover related news content through the same toolbar, without having to switch back and forth between the news discussion page on LinkedIn and the actual news article.

"LinkedIn's ActionBar will allow group members to find and add value to the news that is most important to their respective groups," says Granito. "And, our goal with this iteration is to make it even simpler for users to participate in these conversations."

The action bar is similar to other toolbars from social networks like Facebook and Digg. Today's announcement simply makes the ActionBar more usable with the popular business professional network.