Monday's launch of Shine, which will use a blog format, is aimed largely at giving the struggling Internet company additional opportunities to sell advertising targeted to the key decision-maker in many households. Yahoo said advertisers in consumer-packaged goods, retail and pharmaceuticals have requested more ways to reach those consumers.

Amy Iorio, vice president for Yahoo Lifestyles, said internal research also shows women are looking for a site to aggregate various content and communications tools.

"These women were sort of caretakers for everybody in their lives," she said. "They didn't feel like there was a place that was looking at the whole them - as a parent, as a spouse, as a daughter. They were looking for one place that gave them everything."

Yahoo is partnering with media companies like Hearst Communications Inc. and Rodale Inc. for content exclusive to Shine. Hearst publishes Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and other magazines aimed at women, while Rodale publishes a range of magazines on sports and recreation, including Women's Health.

To put it simply, Jezebel is a blog for women that will attempt to take all the essentially meaningless but sweet stuff directed our way and give it a little more meaning, while taking more the serious stuff and making it more fun, or more personal, or at the very least the subject of our highly sophisticated brand of sex joke. Basically, we wanted to make the sort of women's magazine we'd want to read, a magazine that would never actually see glossy paper because big-name advertisers and the publishers who kowtow to them don't much like it when you point out the vulgarity of a $2000 handbag. Women deserve some of the blame here: if men ever bought $2000 handbags, Esquire and GQ might be as bad -- and profitable -- as Glamour and Vogue.

However, on a day-to-day basis for those of us here in the International Zone in the middle of Baghdad, this has meant that our nights are filled with explosions and gunfire and lots and lots of helicopters flying overhead. It really seems, at times, as if they're flying in circles around our trailers, just to see how many of us they can wake up! (However, as one of my friends pointed out, at least you know that you've got someone keeping you safe this way.)

I'm usually in the office until 9 or 10 p.m., so I miss the lightshows that my friends have been telling me about--all those explosions have a visual aspect, apparently. But in terms of the noise of it all, it's kind of like sleeping through the 4th of July or New Year's Eve for weeks on end! (Or trying to sleep through it...)

This is a hard day to start a blog, because as much as I'd love to be upbeat, I'm worried sick about the families in Pennsylvania who've suffered such a terrible tragedy because of yesterday's shooting at their school.

I know I'm a newswoman, but I'm also a mother and it's impossible to put that aside on a day like today. I'm at a loss to try to understand why someone would do this. I keep thinking about the reports (if they are true) that this man was seeking revenge for something that happened to him when he was 12, and wondering 'what was it?'

Bob Wright, NBC chief executive, told the Financial Times iVillage would become the cornerstone of the GE-controlled group's online activities, much as MySpace has become for News Corporation. The relaunch of iVillage, which attracts about 15m users a month, will add video and community tools, allowing its core audience of women aged between 30 and 50 to swap ideas and advice about topics ranging from health to news.

Mr Wright said it would be tied much more closely to NBC's television programmes, highlighting the opportunity for cross-branding with the Today show, its morning magazine programme. "You're going to see a lot more editorial combinations. It may be as common to see iVillage bringing material to the Today show as the Today show bringing material to iVillage," he said.

It will this year launch iVillage Live, a television show available on the site, which it will also offer to television stations in the NBC network. The site's relaunch will target advertising revenues from the beauty, health and fashion categories, but may also include subscription elements.

When we launched this new site and people started listing their blogs I was blown away by the blogs about cooking and knitting and crafts and gardening and everything else having to do with what goes on inside (and immediately outside) the home. Blogs with huge followings and sense of community; blogs with amazing visuals; blogs that brought back the feeling I had when I first bought my little house...that I wanted to be the next Martha Stewart. (That would be Martha the maker of beautiful things and very good business, of course, not Martha the felon.)

Much as eBay provided a path to profitability for a whole new breed of micro-business owners, blogs have created a similar opportunity. And food and arts & crafts bloggers are leading the way among bloggers who are building businesses.

As Internet usage continues to climb here, so do the numbers of women who have started Web logs, or blogs, to express themselves in ways they might never do in public.

"I love blogging because it helps me to express myself and I like to write in English," says Farah Aziz, a translation student at King Saud University in Riyadh who started blogging in January 2005.

The content of Ms. Aziz's blog, which chronicles the life of a college student, would probably do little to cause alarm among government censors. But other women bloggers are drawing the attention of the state as well conservative male bloggers who have taken to policing the Internet for bloggers acting in ways that they perceive as inappropriate according to Islam.

Saudi Eve, who regularly writes about her love life and religion, and who declined to be identified by her real name because of the sensitivity of the issue, woke up on June 2 to find that her blog had been blocked.

"Back and blocked," she wrote on her blog on June 2. "I'm temporarily back in Saudi only to find that 'Saudi Eve is officially blocked in Saudi.'"

It’s a rendered OPML file, which is a bit different from an ordinary web page. Visually, this list looks like a series of nested outline item. (You'll probably see a folder icon displayed to the left of each item.) Wherever you see a "+" mark next to an item, click on that to expand the view to see what's inside. Similarly, a "-" mark indicates that you can collapse that item, or that the item cannot be expanded further.

I should have picked up on this earlier, but am glad that Susan Mernit did. Out of the CNET list of top 100 bloggers, only a handful are women. Susan counts five, but we are on the list, so I count six eight.(Anita Campbell from RFID Weblog and Staci Kramer from paidContent point out that they're on the list "Not that it changes the numbers much, Kramer adds). I agree with Susan, this is an interesting list and though I am glad Blogspotting is on there, it can't be that hard to find good women bloggers....

At a recent Harvard conference on bloggers and the media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a response on the "comments" space of her blog from someone concerned that if the voices of bloggers overwhelm those of traditional media, "we will throw out some of the best ... journalism of the 21st century." The comment was from Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The Washington Post Magazine [a sister publication of Newsweek]. "It has taken 'mainstream media' a very long time to get to [the] point of inclusion," Jenkins wrote. "My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere ... will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one."

Viewed one way, the issue seems a bit absurd. These self-generated personal Web sites are supposed to be the ultimate grass-roots phenomenon. The perks of alpha bloggers—voluminous traffic, links from other bigfeet, conference invitations, White House press passes—are, in theory, bequeathed by a market-driven merit system. The idea is that the smartest, the wittiest and the most industrious in finding good stuff will simply rise to the top, by virtue of a self-organizing selection process.