All the recent changes at WSJ.com seem to get attributed to Rupert Murdoch’s dubious influence, except this one. Wall Street Journal Online launches a new section devoted to women in business, Journal Women. One of the featured section in this new page “The Juggle,” says it all. The content discusses both tales of successful businesswomen as well as the everyday challenges of balancing work, family, health, etc. The key writer for the site, Carol Hymowitz starts a new column, “Above the Glass” about women and business leadership, while other regular columnists will cover life and family. According to the Journal, this is an extension into “life franchises” and an attempt to provide women’s content that is not all celebrity and fashion. WSJ says (like everyone else) that it is cultivating a “community,” but user-generated content seems fairly absent on the front page, although the Juggle blog is generating considerable user commentary. We would like to see more of that float to the top, however.

We guess that the “Ultimate Prom” probably would have a recording artist like Ashanti headline the affair. That is how the months-long MyPromStyle.com will culminate at the Grand Hyatt this Friday May 30. Hearst Magazines, in partnership with Universal Motown Records and the St. Francis Preparatory School, is hosting the “Ultimate Prom” with Ashanti, JoJo and others performing for the graduating seniors. The Hearst prom planning site MyPromStyle.com has been running prom tips and ongoing videos about this big prom night. It is a novel marriage of sponsors and content that drill directly into the real life experiences of Hearst’s teen girl audiences for CosmoGirl.com, Seventeen.com and Teenmag.com. Like all anxious parents we all hope to see videos from the party itself at the site. Don’t forget us now. And no drinking! The cameras are rolling.

I truly did learn something new at the Streaming Media conference yesterday at the NY Hilton; just how far people will go for a little attention. Everyone has heard at least something about the benefits of streaming live video. This is great for concerts, conferences…anything you’d prefer to view at the exact moment it is taking place. This is called live broadcasting or livecasting. But when streaming media is meant only to display every painstaking detail of someone’s life, it’s LIFEcasting. There are several sites that will help you facilitate your lifecast, though I don’t really want to share the names with you for fear of spreading the disease…ok, fine Stickcam, Mogulus, Kyle.tv and Zannel. Here, you can watch someone wake up in the morning, take a shower (seriously), eat breakfast, drive to work, sit in a cube all day, go to the gym, drive home, make dinner, watch Grey’s and go to bed. Thrilling. Now instead of someone filtering out the “interesting” parts of their day in order to fill a blog, we can actually WATCH someone’s life unfold, no effort required on their end. All they do is plug their camera into their computer and we can watch. Creep City. I want to write this off as yet another “nobody really cares” next big thing, but while watching the 30 minute-long panel at the Hilton, which was being streamed live, 45 people viewed it and 18 left comments. I guess someone cares, it’s just not me.

If the techies at Conde Nast didn’t gird the servers for this one, then someone over there should be sacked. Predictably, the online Miley Cyrus photos from Vanity Fair went all Hanna Montana in late April and drew staggering crowds. According to our upcoming Min’s Digital Box Score from numbers supplied direct from the site, page views went from 5.5 million in March to 31.5 million in April. The main attraction was a behind-the-scenes slide show of the controversial Annie Leibovitz shoot. The images launched on April 28, and even with only three days online it accounted for 66% of site traffic for the month. Oh, go see for yourself and feel that little tug of shame.

Even as many familiar women’s service brands expand into mobile, endemic mobile-only competition arises. The MobileTude WAP site (m.mobiletude.com on your WAP browser) is a “Mobile Magazine for Busy Women.” There are some interesting concepts here that try to give women quick tips, stress-reduction and links in a handheld format. The text-driven design has a lengthy menu of content options, from “Five Minutes for Me” to dinner tips, humor, links to other mobile sites and even conversation starters for talking with your kids. It is a moms-oriented trove of interesting content that arguably is unlike most magazine extensions. The idea seems to be to give you things to do, think about and use when out of the house. What we like about it is the creatvie way it imagines and serves a number of different use cases. The scroll of menu items is longer than you would expect from a mobile Web site, but the headlines tag each in an interesting way. Worth consulting, perhaps copying a bit.

For all the hype and hoopla over Facebook in the last year, the overwhelming share of traffic still goes to Fox Interactive Media’s MySpace, according to the latest breakdown of social networks by Hitwise. Fox Interactive Media continues to struggle to make the social model work for advertisers, however, as the relative ineffectiveness of advertising in these spaces becomes conventional wisdom among buyers. There is loads of room for novel ad and content packaging that makes social media make better sense to ad buyers. eMarketer estimates that about $1.56 billion in ad spending will go into these venues in 2008, up from $920 million in 2007.

The Social Centers

Chart: Top 10 U.S. Social Media Sites and Online Communities (by market share of visits)

1. MySpace        41.50%
2. Facebook        8.29%
3. YouTube        7.39%
4. Craig’s List        2.81%
5. Yahoo! Answers    .99%
6. Yahoo! Groups    .94%
7. MySpace TV    .93%
8. Yahoo! member directory        .78%
9. myYearbook    .73%
10. Bebo        .67%

Source: Hitwise

While the much hyped and poor Quarterlife series crashed and burned in its attempt to jump from Webisodic series to TV prime time, another project has become a real viral online hit. The Guild is a ten-part sitcom series by a gamer and indie filmmaker Felicia Day. The show, which is distributed on YouTube and at www.watchtheguild.com, is a clever look at online gamers but told in a way that appeals to a wider audience. The three-minute episodes are funded entirely by PayPal donations by fans, more than half of which are women. So there, Hollywood digital wannabes. The Guild is a superb example of excellent Web-only content organically grown from the makers’ experience, not manufactured by middle-aged producers trying to look as if they understand digital youth. With over 6 million “hits” (who uses that term anymore?) to its video episodes, this is a genuine online video phenom worth watching both as a model for the platform and as a funny show.

Citing new research on its own base of 30 million social media users, ad services provider Lotame says that ad campaigns into user-generated content require much higher frequency caps in order to capture these users when they are ready to pay attention. Frequent visitors to blogs and network profile pages are so highly engaged in their posting and mailing activities during their first session they pay no attention to ads. During later sessions in a 24-hour cycle these same users are in a more passive mode that can respond well to the message. The company suggests media planners try to target the core influencers in a given social vertical but also hit them repeatedly, sometimes up to 17 times, with an ad.

As part of the Time Inc. Digital Showcase line-up in Manhattan last week, CNNMoney.com flashed its fat video wallet by showing the room full of press only just what Broadband video has done for their site, both in the past and for the future. According to Jonathan Shar, general manager/SVP for CNNMoney.com, the site, which holds content for Fortune, Money and Fortune Small Business magazines, had over 19 million video streams for 2007, a number that is basically unparalleled in the online business/financial news space. “Video has easily become the main feature of our site,” Shar noted, “and it will only grow in the next two years.”

Most interestingly, Shar informed us that instead of just piling video responsibilities on top of the current editorial staffs’ shoulders, they hired a full video staff of twelve (yes, TWELVE) editors and producers, including Caleb Silver, who is executive producer for the video channel. While the staff is huge and thought to only exist in budget fantasy lands like Time Inc., so is the video undertaking, which includes have an original video on each page so that users can read articles while watching the content-complimentary video at the same time.

The recipe site AllRecipes.com is leveraging its user logs wisely to promote the brand with press and media buyers alike in its Monthly Measure look at audience trends. Available in an attractive PDF format here, the internal metric shows how recession and tax time hit food hunters in April. Keyword searches on perennial chart-topper “chicken,” for instance, grew 140% year-over-year, while “pasta” was up 210%, and up from #9 to #3. Meanwhile, “ham,” “carrot cake” and “sugar cookies” all slipped off visitors plates and declined. While we are not sure what we ourselves would do with such knowledge, it is a good sign that content providers are recognizing the market and promotional value in their own data. Used wisely, publishers can elevate their brand by becoming a visible resource to press and marketers.