"It's like when I used to live in a women's dormitory 50 years ago," said Martin, aka the advice columnist Miss Manners.
Going up against thriving well-established destinations like iVillage or More will be no small task. 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. The site fundamentally trades on their celebrity and sophistication. "IVillage has always puzzled me," said Buck, a contributing editor to Vogue and a consulting editor to WowOwow. "I love the idea but it's like Macy's or something."
The women contribute their own blog posts or musings whenever the mood strikes. Most send e-mail messages although Smith has been known to call in or fax her contributions. "Well, I still write with a feather you know," she said.
WowOwow also hopes to be shaped by readers, who can post comments if they register. The "Intuitive" who writes the horoscopes will take daily questions. There are plans for a philanthropic section of the site and a social networking component where readers can create personal home pages and interact with one another.
Statistics show there is a market for such a site. A comScore Media Metrix study of the growth in visitors among the top 100 US Internet properties found that women's community sites were, along with political sites, the top gaining Internet category last year. Unique visitors to women's community sites reached nearly 70 million in December last year, a gain of 35 percent over December 2006. Glam Media and iVillage, the reigning properties in this category, both benefited from the increased traffic.
The start-up investment in WowOwow is US$1 million; the five founders, who are equal partners, backed it with their own money. They have also secured some advertisers, Tiffany, Citi and Sony, and hired five full-time employees who, as Buck put it, "speak cyber."
Still, Evans and company are not necessarily an Internet dream team. They may be coming a bit late to the party. And they have large public personas, which may make it challenging for them to be uninhibited enough to lure readers accustomed to bloggers who never censor themselves.
The medium is alluring to Evans and other WowOwow writers, they say, because it offers a respite from their more structured assignments. Even so, why migrate to cyberspace after long, successful and lucrative careers in other fields?
"It is a young world on that Web, and it's time that a mature or seasoned or empowered generation had a strong presence," Evans said, "and not one about finding a man or about matchmaking or about taking care of your daughter," she added.
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