The fascinating world of mom bloggers

Tilly is "helping"

You might think that I've forgotten about my blog already, but quite the contrary. I've spent the week researching the fascinating world of mom bloggers. (I get the feeling that they — I mean, we — feel "mommy bloggers" is derogatory.) It turns out there's this whole community I had no idea existed.

They have an (online, of course) magazine, Mom Blog Magazine. They have a queen — according to a Feb. 23 New York Times article — Heather Armstrong of dooce.com, who literally makes millions at it. (Perhaps she gets paid for each CAPITAL LETTER.) Not only that, mom bloggers have ads, more ads, sponsored reviews, sponsored tweets and other ways of making money that I don't quite understand and have yet to stick on my moral barometer.

I've also spent time sprucing up this site, though we have a long way to go before it looks as cool as some of the others out there — Selfish Mom and My Brown Baby, just to name two. Then there's the multi-part post about baby advice I'm working on to welcome my surprise niece or nephew (!) into the world. And finally, I've been downloading an apparent flood of post ideas I didn't even know were there from my baby-sodden brain.

Oh, and I logged into my Twitter account for the first time in a while and "followed" some people. I don't get Twitter, at least not as a consumer of posts. I can send out posts all the live-long day, but if I'm following more than a few people (which most do) the feed becomes just a slush pile of jargon, robot posts and hashtags. How do people make sense of the noise? It reminds me of the chaos of MySpace, and we all know clean lines and organized profiles made Facebook so much more appealing. Perhaps I need a tutorial on why Twitter is so awesome. Any fans out there?

So, there's a lot more to learn about this much more sophisticated blogosphere than I thought. But hey, I've already inspired a friend to start a blog, so perhaps I'm in the right place after all.