With Disney.com up and running — even if all the parts aren’t out of beta — the Walt Disney Internet Group is ready to start another launch watch, according to AP: Disney Family at www.family.com. The beta is supposed to go live later this week with features being added throughout the year. (Those features will include mobile access.) It’s a switch for Disney, which, especially since Go didn’t, has focused its online power on its own brands. This site is meant to be an instant entry in the crowded parenting site category, a one-stop info shop mostly for moms. It is also meant to be ad supported via display and other advertising and sponsored search. Not to worry, Disney products will get plenty of play but as part of a wider universe. Paul Yanover, EVP-WDIG and managing director Disney Online: “We want to be clear that ‘Disney’ does not necessarily mean Disney-branded products and services. It means Disney as a reliable brand. We don’t just want to push Disney products.”
— Disney surveyed 30,000-plus moms last year and discovered they wanted a blend of openness — that’s not a word used at Disney.com — and trusted content. Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff told AP: “To get community right, you need to have the right mix between homegrown content plus the ability to loop in people and content from outside. That takes guts because you don’t really know what users are going to say. It’s uncharacteristic for a company that wants to control things as much as Disney.”
— Disney Family has an advisory board including some “mommy bloggers.”
— One feature is a Family 1,000, a filtered list of smaller sites that might not not rank high on Yahoo or Google.
— Comments will be monitored for the usual — foul language, racism, etc.
— One bit of language doesn’t quite work as well for a community site as it does at a theme park or a non-interactive site: guest. Guests visit someone else’s home; they don’t belong to a community.
— Sample page.
Update: Some more details from the press release for Yanover’s announcement slated for Wednesday a.m. in LA:
— The site will include opinion pieces from parenting bloggers.
— Searching across the web, the site or within the Family 1,000.
— A full suite of “community” tools including, eventually, the ability to form groups, and — and interesting aspect — private groups for organizations. (That could be a real draw.)
— A family wiki of parenting topics called the ParentPedia mixing advice from experts and parents.
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