Politico’s Michael Calderon recently discussed the success of the Huffington Post, noting the Center for America Progress’ Eric Alterman referencing the site as a “‘community newspaper’ for the liberal community.” The site has gained considerable popularity since its launch four years ago, so we looked at how the Huffington Post compared to other popular left-leaning blogs and liberal websites as a whole using the new behavior segment features available with Compete’s Enterprise capabilities.

Traffic to some of the top performing liberal blogs – such as DailyKos, Talking Points Memo, Crooks and Liars, and AmericanBlog.com, in addition to the Huffington Post – increased leading up to the November 2008 election, as did traffic to other sites and blogs monitored within the liberal behavior segment. In the graph below, the left axis aligns with UVs for the liberal behavior segment, with the right axis aligning with UVs to the individual websites. As one can see, since the election, traffic to huffingtonpost.com has continued to increase, by nearly 1.4 million visitors, where traffic to other sites has tapered off.

It would appear that visitors to the Huffington Post are also engaging more with the site than those visitors to other blogs. For example, this past month the pages per visits ratio for the Huffington Post was on par with the next most trafficked blog, DailyKos, but the Huffington Post saw nearly six times as many pages views.

Site design and architecture likely factor into this widening gap, as sites like DailyKos and Crooks and Liars post their content in-full on the landing page, where the Huffington Post requires a few more clicks to read complete articles. For this reason, pageviews can sometimes be a gray area as far as measuring engagement, and other metrics – such as average stay – should be taken into account when looking at engagement. While unique visitors to DailyKos since the election average about one-tenth those to the Huffington Post, they average stay for that same period was 3 minutes more than visitors to the Huffington Post.

Since November, visitors to sites in the liberal segment have an average stay of 4.75 minutes. The average stay on huffingtonpost.com has decreased by between 30 seconds to 1 minute nearly every month since October – from a height of almost 8 minutes to the current average of about 3 minutes. While its popularity has made the Huffington Post a center point for the online community that Alterman has suggested, it does not necessarily mean that all of its visitors are engaging heavily with its content.

Following the spirit of service promoted by her husband’s administration, Michelle Obama recently opened the National Conference on Volunteering and Service in San Francisco, speaking to the importance of volunteering. The First Lady announced a summer-long program – ‘United We Serve’ – stressing the importance of including civic service in lives of Americans. Despite the fact that the administration’s volunteer initiatives as still taking shape, we can already see some of the effects of this push online. Traffic to national service groups such as City Year, the PeaceCorps, the AmeriCorps, and Teach for America, have increased over the past six months since the 2008 election, and have seen double-digit growth over the past year.

Americans are also flocking to volunteer website dedicated to local, part-time opportunities. Volunteer information sites, such as VolunteerMatch.org, DoSomething.org, and 1-800-Volunteer.org have seen similar gains as well. DoSomething.org itself has seen traffic more than double since the 2008 November election.

The average time spent on these sites has also seen increases; despite occasional fluctuations, there has been positive growth in time spent online over the past year. In May,on average, visitors spent over seven minutes on the sites for Volunteer Match, City Year, the PeaceCorps – and nearly twice that on AmeriCorps.gov.

We should not, however, attempt to make a direct correlation between the Obama Administration and increase in UVs to suggest a new found civic duty by the American public. Fellow recent graduates can attest the current state of the economy has made the job hunt quite bit harder, and more of us are looking at alternatives to immediately joining the private sector. We can see this in online traffic patterns as well; for example, the trend in UVs for the AmeriCorps website follows a pattern similar to GradSchools.com over the past six months.