From Deseret News archives:
The blogger mom Salt Lake woman's Web rants from home draw raves and revenue
"That's the attitude I have," she said, "and it's made my life a thousand percent better."
Steeling herself against vitriol is one of the challenges of being, by many measures, the nation's top parenting blogger. The 32-year-old at-home mother's irreverent, occasionally profane and often hilarious musings on prosaic topics from potty-training to postpartum depression have propelled her blog, Dooce.com, to No. 59 among the Web's top 100 blogs, according to Technorati, a blog search engine.
The Salt Lake City resident enjoys enviable influence and enough ad revenue that her husband, Jon, quit his job in 2005 to manage advertising for Dooce (rhymes with moose).
Among the Web's 200,000-plus bloggers on parenting and family, few have succeeded to the extent of Heather 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.
Mommy blogs in general tend to be everyday diaries of details one might share over coffee baby's first step or the perils of finding a preschool. Most are blander than Dooce, less humorous and significantly less profane.
Most Web diarists, for example, are too reserved to report, as Armstrong does, that she's "married to a charming geek," had "lived life as an unemployed drunk" for a while, or landed briefly in a mental hospital for postpartum depression. Some mommy-bloggers find her cursing and vulgarity offensive. But it's that outrageousness, humility and raw honesty that also feed her bond with readers, making her dominant in an emerging Web sector Blackshaw calls "The Power Mom."
Recent comments
I think I'm a triplet! Heather, my sister-in-law and I must have all...
bigblonde | April 24, 2008 at 4:35 p.m.
Wouldn't this world be a boring place if we were all the same and all...
Linda in RI | April 24, 2008 at 11:49 a.m.
I love this website. Heather is just "spit my coffee out funny" and...
Julie in Virginia | April 23, 2008 at 12:16 p.m.
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