What do you think of Dooce?
According to the Wall Street Journal, a Salt Lake City mom named Heather Armstrong is the nation's top parenting blogger. I was in a raving jealous rage over impressed with her numbers: her site, Dooce.com, gets about 4 million page views a month. (I get nowhere near almost that many. OK, only in my dreams. But I'm new. We'll get there, right?)
Back to the point. ...With all those page views, some of you must be reading Dooce. A lot. I'd like to know why. And I'd like to know what other mom and dad blogs/sites you read, and why. We're phenomenally busy people, we parents, and yet we make time to read even more about parenting. (And please don't stop doing that. See above.) What makes one parenting site stand out over the other 200,000 out there?
One feature I like on Dooce is Armstrong's monthly newsletters to her daughter, Leta. For one thing, even though they're quite personal, they're a bit of a window on how kids of a certain age can change from month to month. For another, they'll be a great record for her family some day. Haven't we all vowed to write down all the wonderful things our kids say and the bizarre things they do, only to forget?
Comments
I love Chris at notesfromthetrenches.com, a mother of 7 kids and witty as heck.
I'm curious what you think of Dooce, aside from the newsletters. I think there's an interesting question there: What about when Leta can read and access the archives? How will she feel? Is it "fair" to write about her so much?
Posted by: mary | April 11, 2008 8:15 AM
I am not a parent (yet-- I am expecting) but I have been reading Dooce for years. I enjoy the beautiful photography on the site and her sense of style, and her posts are really entertaining.
Posted by: Betsy | April 11, 2008 1:21 PM
I love Sweetney. Her writing is hilarious, consistently of high quality, accessible, real, mommy-oriented but still hip.
Like Dooce, she writes with the professionalism of a regular humor columnist, as opposed to simply an online diarist.
So many of my friends and I, be us bloggers or not, are gaining the fulfillment and entertainment from online blogs that magazines used to provide. I spend a great deal of free time blogging and reading other blogs, but Glamour? Cosmo? Allure? Only if my toenails are being painted.
Posted by: Jessica McFadden | April 11, 2008 1:25 PM
I don't read Dooce or Sweetney, but I do have almost 70 blogs on my reader. Most are Mommy blogs, but some are about cooking, some have nothing to do with kids or the kitchen, and some are the blogs of people I have met in the neighborhood or through the Internet.
What draws me back, besides being entertaining and well written, is the sense of community. I started my blog primarily as a way to chronicle the early years of my kids lives, and was amazed at the friends I have made.
I prefer smaller sites over sites with a huge readership because they feel more personal. When there are hundreds of comments on a post, I feel like mine sort of get lost in the shuffle and the blogger might not recognize my name as a regular reader.
As for the growth of a site, one of the best ways to expand your readership is to get yourself out there. Spend time reading other blogs and commenting. People will reciprocate and if they like what they read, they keep coming back.
Posted by: Kayris | April 11, 2008 8:48 PM