Running With Foxes

Anyone who went to the most recent Women 2.0 conference realizes there aren’t a lot of women in Web 2.0. However, a few have started their own sites designed for surfers sans a y chromosome.

The most recent addition is Chick Advisor, the Toronto based start-up led by Miss Chickie (Ali). Chick Advisor has been letting “chicks” report on products and services (beauty, shopping, restaurants, health, fitness, and deals) since September 2nd. From the start, one of the neatest features is the floating tag cloud that greets readers on the front page. Users can grab on to a term that floats by and click through to related reviews in that area. Reviews are tightly categorized by predefined dropdown menus and provide a five star rating for lust factor, staying power, and price along with the usual narrative.

The breadth of topics and structure really set it apart from Angie Chang’s competing site The Mint Pages. The Mint Pages focuses purely on beauty products, allowing quick user five mint ratings and narrative reviews. Angie outlines her inspiration in a podcast here. However, the site relies heavily on open ended user descriptions of product categories that makes it harder clearly display related products. Chick Advisor allows you to put your review in a pre-defined category and tag it. I also like the finer grained review of Chick Advisor, which looks at three factors that it averages into in overall rating. However, both sites only come close to the end goal of these site, buying new and useful products. Chick advisor has a URL field in its reviews and The Mint Pages certainly allows for a link the narrative, but a mashup with a service like the recently neglected Froogle, or mySimon, could do wonders in harnessing the momentum of these reviews and turn them into commissions for each of these sites.

All-in-all, it’s a smart move to start catering to women on the web and look forward to seeing more sites and entrepreneurs. I’ve hopped on the band-wagon and even added my own product review…

Update: Miss Chickie has informed me that Chick Advisor does use froogle as a default link for reviewed products.

Update:Whereas I’m too lazy to sign up for a blogger account. I would like to thank Amanda for the link love here instead (It’s nice to know someone reads this thing :)). I’d also like to point out another group leading the charge for women on the web, Real Girls Media, a new company that aims to create content and a dialogue amongst women.