On Yahoo's: Shine

I've been meaning to review Yahoo's new portal for women, Shine, for some time now. After spending about 15 minutes a day on it for the past two weeks, I think I'm ready to pass judgment.



Here's the rundown:

Shine is in essence Yahoo's first target of a specific audience as opposed to its usual topical approach (Sports, News and Entertainment), but operates under the same principles.

What you get with Shine is an aggregation mash up of original blogs, user generated content and content from major publishing partners including Conde Nast, Hearst, and Time.

Yahoo's press release says:

The idea is to provide women between the ages of 25 and 54 with information "most relevant to their daily lives.

So, how well is the mash up executed?

Average at best. This is yet another attempt by marketers to tell women who they are as opposed to allowing them to tell the brand who they are.

While I like the cleanliness of the design, the massive font is distracting and looks unprofessional. Navigation, sucks it, big time. When you click on a content channel like, say Love and Sex, a secondary navigation bar opens with Related Topics. The thing is when you click on one of them in any channel you are taken to a list of posts in that topic back on the front page design and the topic navigation goes away. Changing the design colors and taking users off channel is a big no no for me and most designers who want their users to actually be able to find their way around. This seems typical for Yahoo though.

Content is dull. Many of the topics and bloggers write in an incredibly sophomoric style and focus solely on gossip, avoiding being overweight and the proper way to leave your husband if he's cheating. Sigh... I realize that I'm not a woman, but they have to be interested in more than Hollywood, affairs and soap operas.

Don't get me wrong, I like my fair share of "lifestyle" and "fluff" content every once in a while, but Shine isn't doing anything new here. It's just boxing it different and front paging some really terrible advice from its users.

Granted, I'm not in the demographic, but if this is who real women are, I'm glad my fiance isn't one of them.

Go back to the drawing board Yahoo! Retool this beast, get away from dedicating prime real estate to the perfect pair of jeans, the next chick flick and get a little substance. Either that or go with a new masthead that says Yahoo:360 - Desperate Housewives Edition. This just doesn't show any innovation. It has potential but needs a soul.

On Automotive Spy Photos

Recently, I had my year anniversary at Campbell-Ewald. And for the last year, the majority of my work has been on the Chevrolet account.

Now, many people either see the Chevy account as the kiss of death, or see it as the way to make your career. I'm probably somewhere in the middle. On the plus side you get to work on an automotive account, which for a car geek like me is absolute heaven. And, on the negative side, you get to work on an automotive account, which is stressful, difficult and puts you under constant scrutiny. I enjoy the stress of working on Chevy. I believe it forced me to be a decent marketer as fast as humanly possible. And it strengthened my journalistic, research and web skills ten fold.

I now scour RSS feeds more often than I did when I was an investigative reporter, and am constantly tapping industry sources for other info. I now go directly to the consumer to figure out my audience and think we're producing stronger stories and advertising as a result.

But what I haven't figured out yet is to cater to the spy crowd. How do I leverage the Jalopniks and the AutoBlogs of the world? I know I get excited about spy photos... how do I capture that sort of enthusiasm for Chevy vehicles. That would be the theoretical golden ticket.

The audience is a powerful one... and they can be harnessed, but the big question is, how do I get around the legal ramifications of showing pre-production vehicles masked off without upsetting the balance.

Another blog

Just as an FYI. I'm now working on another blog with a co-worker.

It's called Clownshoes. Feel free to visit, comment, and disucss.

On Visual Search Engines

My mom sent me a link to Searchme.com yesterday. I had heard about this being in secure beta testing, but wasn't aware it was now open for regular viewing.

If you've never checked it out, it's probably worth a quick test drive. It's not necessarily anything revolutionary, but it caters to those who love to browse through something more visual than a big list of hyperlinks and meta descriptions.



The Likes:

• It's just plain beautiful. It's fast on my G5. The icons to sort subjects that can be taken in many ways is both helpful and beautiful.


• I dig that it highlights your search term right on the actual screen capture. It's something I've not seen with other visual search providers.


• I enjoy the iTunes like presentation style and like that you can skin it to a light or dark setting.


• The meta description data still pops up if you hover over the visual window.

The Dislikes:

• I get that it's still Beta, but there are clearly problems with the search algorithms within this search engine. As I normally do with any new search engine I get a look at, I used my last name as the initial search test. I was sort of shocked to see that a lot of the results were really old... digging up stuff that I was connected to in the late 90s and early part of 2002 and 2003. It only had one connection to my recent work - which was my editor's letter in Cobalt Mag. I get that it's beta, but it didn't even pick up Danieleizans.com.


• I'm left underwhelmed with the use of flash. It's nice, but they could have jazzed it up and done something at least a little bit different than the same cover switch that iTunes uses. The visual style is not impressive enough to make me want to ditch Google. I do love the use of icons to narrow the search down though. That's quite impressive.


• Finally, I'm left wondering why they didn’t partner with Google to drive the queries. It's not as if that wheel was broken. It seems it would have been just as easy to put the pretty paper on the best tool out there.

Overall verdict: I'm reasonably impress, but won't switch my daily engine, but this is nice for people who might not remember anything about a site aside from what it looked like. It's stunning in the way it gives me ideas for digital magazine presentations and for anyone who wants to have more fun with a search engine, but I think these visual search engines are a bit campy.