Lots of news nuggets flowing in this week, including...

Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort and Jory Des Jardins have launched the BlogHer ad network that will match advertisers with women bloggers. "The BlogHer Advertising Network introduces sponsors directly to the Web's most sought-after consumer demographic -- women who write and read weblogs." Wasn't it just a year ago that BlogHer was a little, sort-of-seat-of-the-pants conference. Now they have their own ad network.

Greetlets is a new "Web 2.0 e-card site.'' Says founder Ed Gogel: "Greetlets is the first-ever build-your-own community e-card site, and uses web 2.0 technologies for all the right reasons. We allow users to build entirely free-form cards using simple DHTML & AJAX-based drag & drop from a library of over 250,000 images & clip art."

StumbleUpon, which we first discovered long ago as a Firefox extension that lets you "stumble upon'' web sites, is now a company with a spiffy, Web 2.0-ish web site. Canadians Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, and Justin LaFrance started the service. They've recently moved to San Francisco, taken angel funding and plan an official launch next week. Business model? We're guessing advertising.

Yokel is a new local search engine intended to help people find products in local stores. "On www.yokel.com, shoppers simply enter a product name (such as "Maytag dishwasher" or "HLR5667W") and city or zip code. Yokel queries its database and displays matching product results from local stores, which can be sorted by relevance or by distance, with the closest stores first." Sounds a bit like StepUp.

UPDATE: A Yokel rep emailed the following comments clarifying how they see themselves as different from StepUp:

We "would just like to clarify the difference between Yokel and StepUp. StepUp appears to be a web hosting company for small businesses, similar in many respects to Yahoo Stores. They charge fee of $40-50 per month and host a virtual storefront where local merchants can display their products. StepUp also syndicates their listings through Googlebase and others.

We are different in that Yokel is much broader, as StepUp is narrow and only displays listings from stores that pay them. The result is that in Boston, StepUp only has listings for three stores which are not of much value to consumers. Also, StepUp requires the stores to do the work to list what products they have. We believe that is burdensome and don't require any of our stores to do anything if they don't want. Hopefully this clarifies our differences."