The Blogger Mom, In Your Face
Apr 12 2008

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on Thursday, April 10, 2008 called The Blogger Mom, In Your Face written by Sue Shellenbarger featuring none other than the most well known mom blogger on the Internet today: Dooce.  She has been blogging for close to 7 years now…before most people (including myself) even knew what a blog was!  I got the opportunity to meet Heather Armstrong (a.k.a Dooce) at SXSW and exchange a few words with her after she finished her panel.  She is such a down to earth person.

I think it’s great that the WSJ has chosen to highlight a mommy blogger who according to the article might be making as much as $40,000 per month on ad revenue for her blog!  Wow!! It’s not without its downfalls though because full time blogging for that kind of money is a crazy, often stressful job.  I blog very part time (3 or so posts per week) so I can’t say I can relate to the stress of full time professional blogging, but I can certainly imagine it…especially if I had to post original, often personal content every day like Dooce does.

According to the WSJ article, “Among the Web’s 200,000-plus bloggers on parenting and family, few have succeeded to the extent of Ms. Armstrong; countless at-home parents would love to be in her position. But less obvious is the behind-the-scenes price an at-home mom pays to shoulder her way to prominence in the blogosphere — giving up her privacy, sustained time off and any remnants of work-family boundaries at all.”

Sue Shellenbarger did a fantastic job with this article by illustrating both the ups and downs of professional blogging, unlike the recent New York Times article called In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop which emphasized primarily the negative aspects of blogging as a profession and inferred that full time blogging can be fatal.  If they had mentioned how many journalists had died in the same period, then I think it might have made the article a bit less biased against blogging.  Check out Marc Andreessen’s funny take on this article called The New York Times Covers Blogging including statements like “Bloggers Have Bad Breath,” “Bloggers Have Herpes,” “Hitler Probably Blogged,” and “The Bloggers Have WMD.”

Other mommy bloggers that were highlighted in the WSJ article are:

5minutesformom.com
designmom.com
parenthacks.com
scribbit.blogspot.com
fussy.org
notesfromthetrenches.com
stirrup-queens.blogspot.com
izzymom.com
suburbanbliss.net

Asha Dornfest at Parent Hacks linked to a guest post on my blog about traveling with a baby and I saw a significant amount of traffic because of her mention, which goes to show that she definitely deserves to be on this list!

If you think there are a lot of mommy bloggers, you should check out Twitter because there are a ton of mommy tweeters out there.  In fact, Wendy Piersall at eMoms at Home just did a post listing the Moms on Twitter and the list is still growing! 

I have to say it’s much easier sometimes to come up with 140 character or less tweets than full blog posts!  I wonder if we can monetize our tweets.   Anyone want to pay me $10, $5, $1, 25 cents for a tweet? 😀   Twitter are you listening reading?

Oh and if you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to my feed because if I survive the next 5 years of motherhood, maybe I’ll end up being one of the top mommy/entrepreneur bloggers!  Unlike Dooce, however, I will have to hire someone other than my husband to help me figure out how to monetize my blog…

Author: | Filed under: blogging, mom, mother, twitter, working mom, working mother | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Those Darn Fortune Cookies!
Oct 9 2007

Those fortune cookies I wrote about back on August 29, 2007 are still haunting me today.  Not only is that post consistently in the top 5 viewed posts because tons of people are doing searches on the term ‘fortune cookies’ for some reason, but also during the weekend of September 22, a reporter from the NY Times contacted me after reading that post about a story she was doing on the appearance of these not-so-great fortunes in Chinese restaurants around the country.

I was more than willing to help her out with the story.  It sounded like fun.  Coincidentally, I was planning to have lunch with a good friend at the same restaurant (Fire Bowl Café) where I got those bad fortunes that following Monday.  When I told my friend about the story she told me that her friend, Karyn Turnbull, had a weird fortune cookie experience at that same restaurant a while back during the time of her engagement.  After grabbing a bunch of fortune cookies which seemed ‘normal’ because apparently they switched suppliers, I spoke to the reporter and subsequently put her in touch with Karyn.   

So the story — Don’t Open This Cookie (Disastrous Day Inside) – ran on the FRONT page of the New York Times Business section on October 8, 2007 (Columbus Day so the kids were off from school) and my quote got cut during the editing process because of space issues.  The reporter was nice enough to give me a heads up the day before so I wasn’t surprised, but I have to say the wind was taken out of my sails temporarily because who knows when I will get the chance to have my name, my company’s name, or my blog name on the FRONT page of the New York Times Business section (an entrepreneur’s dream) again! 

So I write this post to illustrate that the life of an entrepreneur can be an emotional roller coaster.  On Saturday, October 6 I found out I was named an SOB (Yay!) by Liz Strauss and on Sunday, October 7 I found out I would NOT be mentioned on the FRONT page of the New York Times Business section.  Sigh.

But after some blah time and telling my 5 year old son in a humorous tone while tickling him that I was NOT going to be mentioned on the FRONT page of the business section of the New York Times and him asking me ‘what does that mean mommy?’ while laughing, I thought to myself maybe the reason the reporter found me was, in fact, to be connected to Karyn so that Karyn would get the opportunity to tell her fortune cookie story.  So that Karyn and her soon-to-be husband would have a story they could tell for the rest of their lives…to their kids, their grandkids, and their friends.  Who am I to feel bad about that! 🙂

Since this is my blog, I’m the editor, and I don’t have space constraints here is the rest of Karyn’s story:

The other half of our story… After Eric got the ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” fortune, he opened his second cookie, looked over at me, and said “sweetie, I think I got yours.” It said “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.” Both of those will be going into our wedding album! 🙂   We thought it was pretty funny. All of the fortunes I got that day were pretty boring and standard though. I don’t even remember what they said.

So Congratulations Karyn…may your wedded life be blessed with good fortune!

Now for a plea to my readers:  If you like this post, I’d be pleased as punch if you Stumbled Upon it and/or Digg (or is it Dugg) it.  I know I won’t get as many readers as I would have IF I had in fact been on the FRONT page of the New York Times business section (yeesh) but maybe I can come close with a Stumble or Digg or two. 😀

Author: | Filed under: entrepreneurship | Tags: , , , , , | 3 Comments »