Yesterday, BlogHer announced that they raised $5 million in a second round of investment.

• new investor: Peacock Equity, the joint venture between NBC Universal and GE Commercial Finance’s Media, Communications & Entertainment business
• existing investor: Venrock Associates

Back in August 2007, BlogHer raised $3.5 million from Venrock.

In a separate blog post, co-founder Lisa Stone emphasized the associated partnership with three NBC Universal properties:

• iVillage -- the leading destination site for women online
• BravoTV.com
• Oxygen.com

Advertising is also part of the deal:

Women@NBCU, the company’s new content and marketing initiative geared to women, will collaborate with BlogHer on joint advertising sales, which we expect to raise the earning potential of the 2,200 bloggers who are our partners in the BlogHerAds publishing network.

Back to the press release: (emphasis added)

The sales network, comprised of BravoTV.com, Oxygen.com, iVillage and Sugar Inc, creates the largest online aggregation of top-tier women’s media brands.

That brings up one detail that other coverage seems to have omitted: NBCU and iVillage signed a similar arrangement with the Sugar Inc. blog network a year ago. Staci Kramer of paidContent had the scoop at the time:

NBC Universal will announce Wednesday that it is investing in young but hot blog network Sugar Publishing—PopSugar, BuzzSugar, FitSugar, etc. and social network Team Sugar. ... NBCU’s iVillage, which skews older than Sugar’s 10 sites, will take over the network’s display ad sales effective immediately

The iVillage blogs page contains several references to Sugar blogs.

Up next: the BlogHer '08 conference starts tomorrow and runs through Sunday evening.