Rise & Shine - Yahoo!

This morning's debut of Shine seems to suggest that Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) is expanding its focus from emails to females. The struggling portal's attempt at launching a sex-specific site -- this one targeting women between 25 and 54 -- appears solid, with an appealing wave of initial content.Whether it's turning Maxim on its ear by putting out a list of this year's 100 "unsexiest" men or profiling 30 Rock's Tina Fey in a piece pitting her Liz Lemon character as the new Mary Richards, Shine is serving up the kind of viral gold that you know people will email to each other over the next few days.I wish the venture well, but there are still two major hurdles to clear, and neither one has anything to do with a glass ceiling.Not quite the master of its domainsThe first roadblock is that -- once again -- Yahoo! is launching a site as a subdomain. If someone at the office tips you off about this great article on Shine, what's your initial instinct? Go to shine.com, right? Big mistake. That's actually a career-seeking website that India's HT Media is preparing to launch. So if Yahoo!'s Shine is successful, it may actually benefit a rival to its own HotJobs.com website.This isn't something new for Yahoo! Last month's launch of Buzz, at buzz.yahoo.com, made the same mistake -- AT&T (NYSE: T) owns Buzz.com. The same thing happened late last year, when the company launched the Mash social-networking site at -- you guessed it -- mash.yahoo.com. Can you imagine how unsuccessful MySpace would have been if it were launched at myspace.newscorp.com?

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