All for Good basically lets you browse volunteer activities and find related events based on your geographical location and/or interests. The site brings together listings from organizations and local groups to help you find volunteer activities that fit your time and talent. If you ‘like’ a certain item, you can share it with your friends across various social networking services, hopefully spawning more attention and the possibility for the activity or event to spread virally within your network.

According to the about page, All for Good was “inspired by the call of President Obama to engage more Americans in service”. The link to the White House is notable: according to a report by MSNBC, the seeds for All for Good were planted by people who advised Barack Obama during the transition period. Two names that circulate: Jonathan Greenblatt, a faculty member at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California at LA, and Sonal Shah, former head of global development at Google.org who currently leads the new White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. The report also cites Kate Bedingfield, a White House spokeswoman, who apparently said she felt All for Good is “an exciting and innovative idea” and added that the White House is working with the corporation to explore ways to use the tool.

The site is in the process of being transferred to a new non-profit organization called Our Good Works, formed by some of the people who initiated the project. For the moment, the project is hosted and managed by Google, and several of the search and advertising giant’s engineers developed All for Good as a 20-percent project (as widely known, Google lets engineers spend a day a week on projects that interest them).

In the spirit of openness, All for Good is completely open source and lets people log in with a slew of digital identity providers, including Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, Yahoo and OpenID. The service also comes with an extensive API that makes it possible for third-party developers to create applications based on data generated by the All for Good community.

(Via Ostatic)

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Conservative political pundit Tucker Carlson is planning to launch a political news competitor to the Huffington Post, reports The Hill today. The site will be called TheDailyCaller.com and will be focused on reporting news about the Obama Administration but will add “facts to the conversation.”

Implying that the Huffington Post’s coverage is biased, Carlson said that The DailyCaller will be dedicated to “telling the truth and be accurate.” The site’s reporters will share in the profits of the news site based on how much traffic reporters get for their stories. According to Carlson the site’s motto is “every seven minutes,” and will be speedier than its competitors, including HuffPo and The Drudge Report.

Carlson, an MSNBC campaign correspondent who is famous for his conservative spin and love for bowties, denies that the site will be a forum to discuss the future of the Republican party. Regardless of the spin, political news sites are aplenty and Carlson’s site will face stiff competition from HuffPo, the Politico and AOL’s new politics site, Politics Daily. Fellow MSNBC reporter Carlos Watson recently launched The Stimulist, which is focused on reporting long-form news for the Obama generation.

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After showing hockey-stick growth leading up to the U.S. Presidential Elections, Twitter took a breather in November. According to comScore, unique U.S. visitors to Twitter.com grew less than one percent sequentially from October to 1.466 million. U.S. pageviews declined more precipitously to 19.7 million, from 37.2 million in October (a 47 percent decline).

These numbers suggest that about the same number of people are still visiting Twitter, but without all the election Tweets, they are only finding half as much to keep them interested. Remember, this is just a proxy for Twitter activity, as it only estimates visits to the site, and does not take into account all of the other clients and sites where people consume their Twitter feeds.

If Twitter is taking a breather, the HuffingtonPost is winded. The political uber-blog saw a 20 percent decline in unique U.S. visitors from October to November. U.S unique visitors went from 5 million to 4 million, according to comScore. And U.S. pageviews are down 33 percent to 43 million. (Yeah, we saw this coming). Meanwhile, CNN.com was able to build on its election momentum and broader news coverage to grow its U.S. audience 11.4 percent month-over-month to 27.4 million (although pageviews are down 14 percent).

Good thing HuffingtonPost raised $25 million before the numbers turned south. Now it has to readjust to the post-election environment and broaden its coverage as well.

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This third round brings the total amount of funding raised to a whopping $37 million. When The HuffPo raised its $5 million Series B round in September last year, we wondered how much it was worth. Kara’s source indicates the valuation is ‘just south of $100 million’. Rafat Ali recently pegged a similar valuation.

The new capital will serve for recruitment as well as the expansion of The Huffington Post’s offerings into other areas like ‘business, green/clean-tech and investigative news’. They also leave the door open for ’select and focused acquisitions’. Oak Investment Partners has a relevant investment track record, having funded companies like Federated Media (TechCrunch’s advertising partner), Demand Media, MobiTV, Oberon Media and others in the past.

In an interview with BoomTown, Oak’s Fred Harman said:

There is an inevitable shift from offline to online with people increasingly getting their news media online, and this election proved how powerful the Huffington Post could be. And I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site.

Harman, who will be joining The HuffPo’s board, also added:

The cycle of print media is accelerating downward and there are not as many companies with a balance sheet and focus to do it right online. The news market is really up for grabs in a lot of ways … and it is a good time for those who are viewed as authoritative.

Comscore’s traffic report of the blogging network seems to reflect that The Huffington Post is in fact doing something right.

Update: here’s the full press release:

The Huffington Post Announces $25 Million In Funding From Oak Investment Partners

Harman joins The Huffington Post board of directors, whose members include: Eric Hippeau, Managing Partner of Softbank Capital, Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer and Betsy Morgan.

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The elections were good to the HuffingtonPost, the political uber-blog. It’s audience in the U.S. rose fivefold in the last year to 5 million monthly uniques in October, according to comScore (see chart below). In what may turn out to be perfect market timing, the Times UK is reporting that the company is close to raising $15 million. In the past, it has raised a total of $12 million from investors including Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Bob Pittman, and Ken Lerer.

As with all political sites, it is likely that the HuffPo’s traffic will dip now that the election fever is over. The question for investors, though, is whether its current levels represent a peak or, whether it can take advantage of its new-found audience to establish a solid, new traffic floor from which to keep growing. If you look at the HuffPo’s chart from Google Trends (above), it looks like traffic is at the very least plateauing so far in November, as you would expect.

Where does it go from here?

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This should be fun to watch.

Can you say IPO?

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