Everybody wants us females, courtesy of our tendency to plunk down bucks for whatever grabs us. Now Yahoo enters the select market fray with ‘Shine,’ a new website devoted to the usual suspect temptations—beauty, celebs, entertainment, and among other topics, the always reliable ‘Love + Sex’ and the predictable ‘Work + Money.’ There’s an upfront interview with Kate Bosworth whose new movie ‘21’ has been trashed by many critics but is popular with viewers. There’s a sub-story about Al Gore’s climate change platform and sidebar tips on how to be good to your body this week.

At the moment the brand new site looks a lot like one of the women’s magazines my daughters and I subscribe to, begging the question of how Yahoo plans to set its newest brand apart from iVillage and the numerous other websites devoted to those of us targeted by more advertisers than you can count. There is the general impression that Shine is more interested in the professional in the marketplace than the homemaker.

Seriously missing from the new site is politics—there’s a tip of the hat to liberal politics but no conservative content. It doesn’t matter to me either way, but I’m thinking you can’t assume all women belong to a single party. And it’d be wise to assume women are definitely interested in politics. That’s why all the candidates from both parties schmooze us so much with rhetoric. Also missing is another category women are crazy about. Poetry. I know that because I’ve been on the ground and in the clouds with that subject for years and even had a chain bookseller tell me my poetry book was a bestseller. Don’t get too excited about that. I made more income from my smallest freelance account last year than I did from a year of royalties from my poetry collection. My publisher told me the only reason he does poetry is because he enjoys reading it himself.

The site does offer blogs and comments features. I posted a question about the former because I didn’t see any sort of terms explaining what rights Yahoo acquires if you choose to blog there.

Many of us appreciate the services Yahoo provides—I enjoy email accounts and website hosting for a very reasonable fee. Hopefully as Shine matures, there will be more content described by PC magazine as “more substantive.” Maybe then we targets will plunk down bucks for products touted in the ads that at the moment seem to dominate the page.

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