Welcome Back Rosenthal

To follow up on my very late Mother’s Day piece from yesterday I thought I’d tackle the issue of mom bloggers or mommy bloggers as I’m hearing a lot these days too. Wow, it’s seems strange as hell to be talking about a “mom blogger” at all. At first. But then you think about it…and it makes perfect sense! Listen I’ve been messin’ around with computers since a little ol’ thing called the TRS-80. Can you take a guess what year that was? I’ll give you a hint it’s in the model number of the computer. And at the time I couldn’t afford the $499.00, or was it $599.00? And my mother didn’t see what I would do with such a thing in the house-of course at the time a lot of NON-mothers couldn’t see what you would do with it. Even ME. But I knew I wanted one because I wanted to build an Iron Man war suit (see how things really don’t change that much) I didn’t know exactly how, but Tony Stark had one so I figured I’d need one too. But blogging in moms at home seem like a perfect match; women like to communicate, if they don’t have an paycheck job but have a family they tend to have this block of alone time during the middle of the day, most that I’ve met enjoy being busy, and they’re like 51.7% of the internet population now. Fait accompli.

So imagine my surprise when I my mother called ME to tell me I that I had to watch Nightline one day last week. She told me there was a woman on TV and she was a mom-but she had a blog “just like me.” However, she was “making millions of hits” and how come I wasn’t? So now mom wants to talk about computers. No, I did not remind her that we had a chance to get in the ground floor almost THIRTY years ago. I just said I would watch the program. But this was not my first contact with a mom blogger. I would say I first ran into one (online of course) about 2 months ago. I had decided I would try to make money with my blog so I started doing research. I looked at a lot of blogs and one that I came across had me laughing my ass off because of a photo that was posted . I think I left a comment and started going back maybe once a week and reading her accumulated works from the week. But a couple of weird elements caught my eye; first of all she was posting like 2 and 3 times a DAY. And she was always talking about these different kids-and then I realized that the title of her blog Is8Enough referred to how many kids she had. Wow! She also used term I had never heard; SAH wife. I later took a guess and came up “Stay At Home.”

As I started visiting more and more blogs (trying to figure out how to make money) I was VERY surprised that it wasn’t all guys like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. I mean, all the computer guys I knew back in the 90’s, when I last got involved with computers, LOOKED like computer guys. Add to that the razzle dazzle days of the internet boom and the young hipsters. So that’s what I expected a bunch of young dudes and a bunch of old fat dudes like me. So when I started seeing all these blogs with pastels, and flowers, and cartoon avatars of smiling ladies I was surprising. And you know, I’m human and can adapt, I got up to speed and just said “ok, that’s the way it is.” But I have noticed a difference in how the moms blog. Most of the dudes are talking about what technique they’re going to try or have tried to make cash and they’re all anxious to report how MUCH money they made, even if it’s only a little. Full disclosure, as they say, I’ve done this too. But the women, moms or not, I’ve notices tend to have deals. Lots and lots of deals. They find something and then they report. Don’t miss out on this, or that, or that one over there. So it’s good. There’s stuff to be learned from everybody! Oh, almost forgot; the mom blogger from Nightline.

So her name is Heather Armstrong, She has a blog called Dooce. SHE says the name is supposed to sound like “dude” not douche. Judges? Well apparently she’s a rich and famous blogger. According the Nightline story she gets a million visitors a month and makes $40,000 a month. She was on a daytime news show the day after the Nightline story and she’s “talking to Hollywood” about some of her blog’s elements being repurposed. Those elements by the way include photos and videos of her, her daughter and her husband John-who now works for her .

By the way in case you meet her in person keep in mind- SHE doesn’t want to be known as a mom blogger, so…I guess she is a blogger who is a mom. I visited the site and it’s got a top Alexa and a PR nothing. Clearly something is going on with her and Google. I found indexed pages going back to 2004, so you don’t get to a MILLION uniques a month without having been ranked by Google at some point. Although she said she was a web designer, so maybe she knows something (see comments below for update on this; when I visited it was PR gray-bar, not even PR0). Lastly, you may have noticed she’s quite attractive. Well SHE doesn’t want to be known for being attractive; it’s the insightful and witty look at family life that’s supposed to be the blog’s calling card. Still…a tall, thin, attractive, blond, white woman-well I’m not going to say we have a culture built around that set of criteria, but….Listen, I’m sure it’s the writing. The Hollywood thing too, got to be the writing.

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