Mommyblogger Dearest

She is woman, hear her blog:

What is a ‘mommyblogger,’ you may ask? A common question - I’ve even met fellow academics who specialize in blogging who have never heard of us.

Simply put, the term have come to describe mothers (with the stray stay-at-home dad in the mix) who maintain blogs that chronicle and deal with raising their kids and their life after kids. These bloggers vary greatly in terms of tone and focus, but in general, they take a very intense and irreverent look at parenting. They discuss potty training in graphic terms. They talk about tossing back a beer with other parents. They show off projects that they are working on. They complain about the amount of homework their kids get and agonize over how many hours they are in front of the television or (ironically) the computer. They cheer on and encourage their fellow online parents. Some mommybloggers have particular niches, like parenting kids with special needs or moms with PhDs and form sub-communities revolving around those interests.

Many of them reside in the intersection of politics and parenting, like Bitch, PhD, Half Changed World, Electric Venom and my blog, 11D. Some mommybloggers have made the jump to full-time political blogging, such as MOMocrats. In this world, there is no separating the personal from the political.

Naturally, since most of these bloggers are women and they’re writing about kids and diapers and all, many guys write them off as marginal girlie stuff.

Marginal? Not according to the numbers. Dooce is number 41 on Technorati’s Top 100 blog list. She has more readers than most of the well known political blogs and she’s linked to more often than Andrew Sullivan or Michelle Malkin. In April 2008, she had 5.5 million pageviews and her comments number regularly in the hundreds. A recent post had 814 comments.

She’s not alone. Blogher lists 3,200 self-identified mommybloggers on its blogroll, but those numbers aren’t close to their overall numbers. According to a 2006 study by the Pew Foundation, many more bloggers are using their blog to record their personal experience, rather than merely sharing political opinion. 52 percent of bloggers said that the main reason that they blog is to express themselves creatively. Only 34 percent of bloggers saw their work as a form of journalism. 37 percent of bloggers said their “life and personal experiences” was the primary topic of their blog. Only 11 percent said that politics was the primary topic of their blog. Technorati is tracking 112 million bloggers. If half of those blogs are personal blogs, then 56 million are personal diaries.

Read the whole thing.
Wow.

Technorati Tag: Mommyblogging.