The NYTimes recently featured a story about a new Web site for the 40+ crowd: Wowowow, a title the founders had to wrest away from a porn site.
The fare on the new PG-13 Wowowow is in some ways no different than that of other women-focused community Web sites like iVillage: horoscopes and posts about love and marriage, health and fashion. Wowowow also has political commentary, but what is particularly distinctive are the conversations, …which read like deeper and more intimate versions of the “hot topics” segment of the television gabfest “The View.”
“It was very loose and fun and intimate,” [Candace] Bergen said of participating in the discussions, which the women have practiced while the site is in beta mode. The cozy tone of the exchanges, the participants say, reflects their decades-long overlapping friendships, stretching back to the 1960s and ’70s when many were among the first women pioneering their media and entertainment fields
Candace Bergen? Oh, yeah, and Peggy Noonan, Joan Juliet Buck (one of my favorite Vogue writers), Lily Tomlin, Judith Martin (aka Miss Manners), Whoopi Goldberg and site founders Liz Smith, Lesley Stahl, Mary Wells and Joni Evans, all media titans (or titanias) and all of a certain age. Nice cast.
Wowowow’s chief appeal may be the glimpse it promises into the personal lives and beliefs of a group of businesswomen who broke through glass ceilings… “IVillage has always puzzled me,” said Ms. Buck, a contributing editor to Vogue and a consulting editor to Wowowow. “I love the idea but it’s like Macy’s or something.”
Gee, I ASPIRE to shop at Macy’s. I hope they’re not too lofty for the rest of toiling away at home, in classrooms or middle-management.
Statistics show there is a market for such a site. A comScore Media Metrix study of the growth in visitors among the top 100 United States Internet properties found that women’s community sites were, along with political sites, the top gaining Internet category last year.
Well, that’s certainly some vindication for my earlier lament over the dearth of sites. I know I’ll be logging in.
(FYI. I clipped this from another blog that I have been experimenting with, so if you find another blog with this entry, I have in essence plagiarized MYSELF.)
April 3, 2008 at 5:20 am
I visited wowowow.com for the first couple of weeks after it went live but found that there was really no discussion there–just people posting their comments. I became uninspired pretty quickly and haven’t been back. I guess the lure of a peek into the lives of the rich and famous just wasn’t strong enough for me.