PopSugar

PopSugar has grown from a modest little celebrity gossip blog to a sprawling network of professionally wriitten blogs supplemented by a nice set of social networking tools. Navigating the site -- actually more than a dozen spin-off sites including BellaSugar (beauty coverage) and FitSugar (exercise) accessed from one tabbed interface -- is not easy. Sometimes it's not clear where posts end up or what some tools do. But the writing is crisp, the photos gorgeous, and the day's news filtered through the prism of celebrity, making this an addictive site teens will want to visit again and again. PopSugar is more than just beefcake shots of Robert Pattinson, though. It's also sex advice and content way beyond teens like child care and marriage communities. Despite the cartoonish avatars, PopSugar is for women, a demographic it serves well.

Online interaction: Users can interact lots of different ways: email, guestbook entries, sending and receiving virtual gifts, posting to a Twitterlike “chatter” public stream, message boards and blog comments. (When we visited in August 2009 the live chat room wasn’t working.) Moderators seem to do a good job of cleaning up any personal attacks, threats, spam or lewd images, and users have a flagging tool at their disposal. As a result, interactions are mostly friendly and respectful.