All Things Digital

As BoomTown argued yesterday in a piece on the landscape of Yahoo if Microsoft completes its purchase of the Internet portal, Yahoo (YHOO) certainly knows how to make online content.

As we wrote: “For all its history, right down to today, even with all these dumb widgets competing for users’ attention, Yahoo continues to natively understand how to to entertain, inform and serve up their own and others content to consumers.”

Case in point, an attractive new site it launched today called Shine, which is aimed at women from their mid-20s to their mid-50s.

As you can see from the image below, it is a very well-done site, incorporating a lot of the good stuff in the same genre from around the Web.

Does it look a bit like the sassy properties of Sugar Inc.? Is it light and frothy like Glam Media? Does it feel a bit like DailyCandy, in its focus on the shopping as a sport? And, is it as helpful as iVillage (and does it even “borrow” a wiggly “i”)?

Yes indeedy to all!

Imitation is a form of flattery, I suppose, although Yahoo’s site feels fresher than any out there and it has an aspirational and hip feel that women will like, I think.

I’d call it an Eat-Pray-Love mood, with a lot of Oprah mixed in.

More importantly, it is clearly a good market for Yahoo’s advertisers, who all aim to reach this high-spending but underserved demographic online.

Yahoo is trying to reinvigorate its lackluster efforts here, as well as making plans to further drill down into related topics like parenting, sex, food and wellness that are present on the Shine site now.

While it looks a lot like a blog plus, Shine obviously has social written all over it and a wide range of communications tools will be easy to layer over the service.

It also is smart in its partnering with lots of media companies like Hearst and in pointing across the Web to give users a more comprehensive offering.

But can Yahoo compete in a very crowded field with such a late entrant? Probably. It recently put up a celebrity site called OMG, which has grabbed significant traffic quickly.

And while we honestly could care less if men look bad in skinny jeans (um, yes!), there is probably something on the very-full page of interest to everyone.

The Shine site has Brandon Holley as its editor-in-chief, but the effort in the arena is being helmed by Amy Iorio, who is the VP/GM of Yahoo’s Lifestyles unit. It all rolls up under Yahoo Media SVP Scott Moore.

While Yahoo PR will probably blah-blah too much about “starting points,” which is the latest buzz word from top brass, related to Shine, it should just hush up and realize Yahoo’s many owned-and-operated media conglomerations just need decent support and promotion to stay as strong as they are and to keep them as one of the bright spots at the company.

Here’s a screen shot of the site (click on the image once to make it appear on another page and then again to make it larger):

And on the seventh day, at least we did not get another lump of Sugar.

After a year of manic site creation, Brian Sugar actually bought his first company, rather than extend his name further in the online women-focused arena.

Yesterday, Sugar’s San Francisco-based Sugar Publishing–which includes the flagship PopSugar (celebs), GeekSugar (tech), CasaSugar (home), YumSugar (food), well, we could go on but won’t for fear of lapsing into a diabetic coma–changed its name to Sugar Inc. and also acquired ShopStyle.com.

The all-equity deal for the Los Altos, Calif.-based social-shopping site will give Sugar a nice bit of technology to play in the Web commerce space more aggressively, with features that allow the quick creation of shopping widgets using products grabbed from all over the Internet.

Think of a digital version of one of those massive kitten-heel shoe spreads in Lucky magazine that also allows you to instantly buy stuff you see and you’ve got the right idea.

We sat down with the jumpy (really, he is) Brian Sugar and made a video interview recently, after noticing the tear he and his wife Lisa have been on since they founded their mini-empire last year.

Their activity has caused notice–last year, Yahoo almost bought the network of sites. The Sugars were probably glad they missed that bullet now, as their sites seem to be growing faster without a big partner.

The start-up is backed by Sequoia Capital and also NBC Universal, which have both sunk $15 million in total into the company, which uses a unique cross-pollinating style to grow its audience to about 5 million unique visitors a month.

NBC, via its iVillage subsidiary, sells the Sugar Network’s ads in a guaranteed deal for the company.

While it is a crowded space in all of Sugar’s subsidiaries, it’s also nice to see a sassy effort from the Sugars, who use a sweeter (sorry!) approach to coverage–some might call it saccharine (sorry again!) even–in the blog genre.

In other words, Lindsay Lohan is still a drunken, drug-addled mess, but don’t those super white nails look amazing!!!

The new buy is in keeping with Brian Sugar’s background of online commerce (top stints at J. Crew online and also Kmart’s ill-conceived BlueLight.com) and give Sugar sites another tool in an interesting arsenal.

“We’re aimed at an ADD culture,” said Sugar to me yesterday, and he is not kidding.

Each of his more than a dozen sites–yes, there is also a social network called TeamSugar, as well as a tagging site called, yep, Sugarlicio.us–has from 15 to 25 posts a day, with the user-generated content numbering upward of 15,000 items.

It all makes us feel like we’ve gained five pounds by just lingering on the sites. (Sorry once again, but these sugar puns are hard to resist!).

See Sugar in action:

Here is another video I took of the offices of Sugar Inc. (the network of women-aimed blog sites) in San Francisco, including meeting yet another Sugar. That would be Katie Sugar, the adorably sweet (of course) daughter of Lisa and Brian Sugar.