NEW YORK--In the high-ceilinged SoHo offices that once housed an art gallery, Rachel Sklar is juggling a slew of stories destined for the virtual pages of the Huffington Post.

There's her interview with author Gay Talese, an analysis of the Obama Girl video spoof, a look at all the iPhone hype and an assessment of Us Weekly's bold publication of a Paris Hilton-free issue. Sklar's provocative writing has drawn the attention of New York's gossip blogs (which keep obsessing on her bosom).

"Everyone's amused by the attention I get," says Sklar, who edits the Eat the Press section. "I'm 34. If it's going to immortalize me as an ingenue, that's fine."

The former lawyer is one of 45 mostly young staffers toiling here, up from six when the Web site launched two years ago. Ken Lerer, the Huffington Post's co-founder, encourages her to appear on television.

"I keep saying to Rachel, 'Become more visible. Be the Arianna of the media page,' " Lerer says.

Few people, of course, are as visible as Huffington, the author turned activist, conservative turned liberal and California gubernatorial candidate turned online entrepreneur. When she launched her group blog in 2005, skeptics dismissed it as a vanity outlet for her and her Hollywood friends. But the Huffington Post has become an undeniable success, its evolution offering a road map of what works on the Web.

The most notable change is that HuffPost has morphed from a left-leaning site with a modest conservative presence to a pugnaciously liberal operation in which the banner headlines and majority of bloggers holler about the latest outrage perpetrated by the Bush administration.

"We are opposed to the war in Iraq," Huffington says from her Los Angeles home. "We think the troops should come home. The headlines are going to reflect what is in the best interests of the country."

As Lerer puts it: "Attitude is a huge positive, not a negative. People don't have to love you. Maybe people come to you because they don't love you."

After President Bush commuted Scooter Libby's sentence last week, HuffPost put up 15 blogs -- every one of them critical -- including one from Huffington and another by Russell Shaw headlined, "President Bush, You Are a Disgrace to My Flag."

Beyond ideology, though, the Huffington site has succeeded through its relentless updating, serving up links to all manner of news and entertainment in a manner pioneered by conservative cybergossip Matt Drudge.

"We could not have existed without Drudge," Huffington says. "Drudge habituated people to going online for their news." Editors constantly monitor the traffic, keeping popular items up and yanking those that attract fewer readers.

The site has benefited from content-sharing partnerships with the gossipy TMZ.com, People, Rolling Stone, Variety, Yahoo and Josh Marshall's popular liberal salon, Talking Points Memo. This represents a sea change, says Huffington, from the days when the mainstream media were reluctant to share content with other online sites.

Huffington Post readership has roughly doubled in two years, with the site claiming 3.5 million visitors per month, although independent ratings services put the figure far lower.

To accommodate the flood of copy, Huffington has redesigned the site, creating separate home pages for such subjects as politics, media, entertainment and business. She says her contributors "also wanted to write about movies and books and sex and health, and it was hard to fit it all in." And the best outsiders posting comments will now be elevated to blogger status.

The initial publicity focused on how Huffington's showbiz pals -- Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, David Geffen -- would give the group blog a veneer of glitter. "The press went with that because it was a good story to write," Lerer says.

Actually, that was how the site was promoted. These days, as the Huffington Post runs 70 to 80 posts a day, most of the authors -- with a few exceptions, such as Bill Maher, Nora Ephron and Jamie Lee Curtis-- are not boldfaced names. They are largely lesser-known commentators, bloggers, radio hosts and experts, current and former Democratic politicians (Gary Hart, Jack Murtha, John Conyers) and, sometimes, famous advocates (Melinda Gates, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.). Occasionally, Huffington reprints conservative columns by the likes of the Washington Times' Tony Blankley, saying it's important to include them as minority voices.

HuffPost is also venturing into original reporting, hiring such journalists as Tom Edsall, a longtime Washington Post reporter. "They have a very liberal constituency, but say they are looking for straight and credible news," says Edsall, who holds a Pulitzer chair at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. "Arianna has thousands of sources on the left and the right, and she comes up with a lot of ideas."

Huffington says she has recruited more than 1,000 volunteers for a related blog, dubbed Off the Bus, in which citizens will sound off on the presidential campaign.

"We've already seen example after example of what happens when reporters hop on board the same bus -- and the Conventional Wisdom gets passed around like a joint at a Grateful Dead concert," she writes. The antidote, says Huffington, who is teaming up with New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, is "crowdsourcing" -- that is, channeling the wisdom of the masses.

But Off the Bus is unlikely to skid off the liberal track. The project is headed by Amanda Michel, who worked for Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, and Zack Exley, who ran online communications for John Kerry's 2004 campaign.

Even non-liberals may be drawn to HuffPost's slick packaging. Sklar, who says she patrols "the intersection of media, pop culture and political comedy," keeps finding offbeat nuggets, including the revelation that Texas Monthly's cover on "astronaut sex" was perhaps its worst-selling issue ever. She is also capable of finger-in-the-eye writing, such as her response to a prominent Vanity Fair columnist's assertion that women just aren't funny: "Boring, Warmongering Blowhard Christopher Hitchens Adds 'Sexist' to His Résumé."

"I major in media and minor in feminism," Sklar says.

Lerer, a former Time Warner executive and the site's earliest major investor, says the venture continues to raise money from such investment banks as SoftBank Capital. He says the company, which gets most of its revenue from advertising, has drifted in and out of profitability.

"Twenty years ago, it would take 20 years to build a brand," Lerer says. "Today, you can build a brand in a year."