Armstrong's fan base is a powerful lure for advertisers. Neither she nor her husband will discuss ad revenue, but they and the Internet rating service Quantcast say that Dooce draws about 4 million page views per month. In a "quick back-of-the-envelope guesstimate," Shani Higgins, Technorati's vice president, business development, estimated the site could yield $40,000 a month in revenue from companies coveting her traffic, such as BMW and Verizon.

Armstrong's product endorsements — bestowed only on items she's purchased, she said — wield impressive clout. Yukiko Kamioka in Colchester, England, said she was struggling with only 10 visitors a day to her Web site, seabreezestudio.co.uk, until Dooce endorsed her handmade bags; 3,000 visitors immediately swamped her site, and she soon sold out of her merchandise.

The life of a blogger, though, inflicts significant strain. A scathing parody on ViolentAcres.com, set up as a letter to her daughter Leta, said, "Since your father and I started exploiting you for cash, neither one of us has had to work a real job for a few months now. Score!" Recently, another popular blogger on parenting, Boston writer Steve Almond, quit his BabyDaddy blog on Babble.com, citing "angry and aggrieved" responses to his writings.

Behind her hip facade, Armstrong feels similar pain. She said she has sought therapy to cope with vitriolic posts. "The hate mail will invariably happen, and when it does your entire world will crumble around your ears," she said. In one example, she said a person she thought was a friend posted a comment saying she "wanted to punch me in the face because she hated me so much." She added she can understand why "famous people turn to drugs or commit suicide."

Of course, Armstrong can dish it, too. A former Web designer, she was fired from her job in 2001 for writing negative posts about her bosses. Her site's name soon became synonymous with being axed over the contents of your blog, according to UrbanDictionary.com — as in, "I've been dooced."

She's had to learn to draw boundaries on what she writes, to avoid hurting loved ones. An "aching and bleeding diatribe" she posted a few years ago against her parents' faith, Mormonism, alienated them so badly that "it was like a bomb had gone off in my family," she said. "My dad didn't speak to me for several months, and my mom was devastated." She took down the posts, thinking, "OK, this is a little bit more powerful than I'd thought it would be," she said.