At least San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has the good grace to look a little bit sheepish when he offers San Franciscans the opportunity to watch him talk city politics for SIX HOURS on YouTube video.

The mayor of the liberal, tech-friendly California city has broken the ’state of the city’ speech into a handful of roughly 40-minute YouTube video segments which offers “the opportunity for you to spend one minute with me, one hour — as much as five or six hours if you choose,” he says in the intro.

Known for his support of gay marriage, Newsom delves into nearly every other issue, including a five-year plan.

“Just what I wanted,” said Aaron Peskin, outgoing president of the Board of Supervisors, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “Somebody imitating Al Gore for 7 1/2 hours. The guy did a Fidel Castro.”

Web watchers have given many videos high ratings, although a few days after launch only about 10,000 had watched even the 1-minute intro, and no one had posted a comment on YouTube.

Still, it’s early days yet. Gems like “Emergency Planning” are still to come.

Political Web sites and blogs compete for scoops and eyeballs with an intensity rivaling the presidential candidates, so the Internet traffic figures released Wednesday by industry tracker comScore are likely to provide some bragging rights.

The winner is… HuffingtonPost.com  – founded by commentator Arianna Huffington, the site led among stand-alone political blogs and news sites with 4.5 million visitors in September, comScore said. That was way above the site’s tally of 792,000 in the same month last year.

It was followed by Politico.com with 2.4 million visitors and DrudgeReport.com with 2.1 million. The biggest gainer among the top five was realclearpoltics.com, a clearinghouse for commentary and polls that has become a must-read for the politically inclined. Its traffic surged almost six-fold from last year to 1.1 million visitors.

One of the few sites to see its traffic decline was FreeRepublic.com, a conservative-leaning site, which was the fifth most-visited destination but saw its traffic dip slightly to 987,000 visitors. Do the traffic numbers offer a larger comment about the ardor or optimism of either Democrats or Republicans in this election cycle? That’s a debate that’s probably better left to the pundits.

(reporting by Gabriel Madway)