AROUND the world, switched-on blogger mums are sharing their experiences online and the world is listening.

HER DAY gets off to “not a good beginning” when she wakes to find the coffee maker flashing “Error 8”. On top of this, the children are a challenge: “No one is responding to me — ‘Time to put on your shoes’. No Response.”

Her little girl is dressed but her boy is still asleep at 8am, and they need to leave for school in 20 minutes (armed with wrapped gifts for a charity drive).

Once there, she needs to linger outside the classroom because her son is teary, making her run late. After a hectic day’s work she dashes home to host a visit from an aunt and uncle, make cupcakes for a bake-off, bathe with the kids and wrestle them through a shampoo before popping out with friends.

It could be the diary of any multi-tasking mum, but this is a day in the life of none other than Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow, as recorded in her personal blog, Goop. Though pilloried when she launched the blog three years back, lately the megastar’s catalogue of personal experiences, recommendations and anecdotes has been gaining followers — and credibility — with every passing month.

And why wouldn’t it: when it comes to mummy blogging it seems everyone is doing it. Yummy mummy Paltrow is just one highly visible, celebrity face.

What started in the early 2000s as an online niche among disparate but hopeful mothers everywhere from Utah to Northumberland has boomed in the past few years into a massive global trend — and one with serious political, social and business clout.

In the US, where the “mommy blog” really took off about five years ago, online analyst eMarketer says that in 2010 a staggering 3.4 million “moms” had their own blogs — posted on a blogging platform such as WordPress or blogspot.com, or on their own websites. In the UK, the influence of the mummy bloggers is so powerful that prospective prime ministers line up to be interviewed for their biggest online forums. And in Australia, an ever-growing army of tech-savvy mums is not far behind.

Though statistics on Aussie-mum bloggers are hard to pin down, the community is now large enough to have sustained its first national meet-up, the Aussie Bloggers Conference, in Sydney earlier this year. It attracted 170 bloggers from around Australia. Renamed DigitalParents.com.au, the next conference is planned for Melbourne next year.

In May, Melbourne hosted its first Bloggers Brunch, set up by the marketer Christie Nicholas of KidsBusiness.com.au and held at a Prahran play centre. It hosted 50 mums and a host of businesses keen to meet them. It drew such strong interest online that another is planned for July 29.

Nicholas, who connects businesses with mums, chose the attendees based on their blog traffic (number of visits) and says that between them the 50 mothers had an audience of up to 60,000 other women.

“I’ve been working as a marketer for 10 years and I could see the trend (of mum blogs growing),” she says.

The day after her next event, the Australian arm of the international blog advertising network Nuffnang holds its first Australian Blogopolis conference, at Federation Square, offering bloggers a full day of seminars on how to boost their blogs.

Nuffnang’s Australian manager, David Krupp, says the conference was designed to accommodate 200 bloggers, but tickets sold out in 72 hours. Such is the enthusiasm for it the room was made larger, but still only a few of the 100 extra tickets are left.

And it is not only other parents who are avidly reading about everything from the travails of domestic life, or juggling work and family, or travelling with kids, or parenting special-needs kids, or managing multiples, or parenting alone — all written by uncensored strangers.

As the Aussie mum blogger community has bloomed, and only looks set to keep expanding, companies keen to boost conventional marketing with word-of-mouth are watching, too.

Aussie Bloggers Conference organiser and blogger mum Brenda Gaddi describes the Australian mum blogger community as “exploding like crazy” and says as numbers grow so does its influence.

“Brands are courting us and sooner or later we will have politicians knocking at our doors too,” says mother-of-four Gaddi, whose blog is called Mummytime. “In America it is so huge it is an industry, and here brands are recognising that mum bloggers have influence and a voice and can actually make a change to the bottom line.”

She stresses, however, that many bloggers do not attempt to “monetise” their blogs (by allowing space for banner ads and doing sometimes paid product reviews).

“At the heart of it (the mummy-blogger trend) is just stories and the relationships we form with one another. I’m friends with these bloggers — to me that’s the most important thing about blogging.

“I’m a stay-at-home mum and if I go online my friends are there. That’s the greatest thing about it.”

Indeed, many bloggers say that as peer support for new mothers is diluted as more women return to work — and so do their mothers and mothers-in-law — the support and love they receive from blog friends online and later IRL (in real life) is vital in helping to maintain their emotional health.

Moonee Ponds mother Amanda Cox, the author of the wholeheartedly uncensored blog Diary of a Mad Cow, says the friendship and empathy she received when she started blogging about her post-natal depression was authentic, and invaluable.

“I just kind of felt really isolated and did a fabulous job of hiding my PND. Everyone in my mothers’ group thought I was totally with it and capable of doing everything — I’ve always had a bit of a sense of humour,” says Cox, who started blogging in 2005 and also started the online parenting forum realmums.com.au.

“The whole point of the blog for me is it forces me to see the funny side of things. It forces me to have a look and go, ‘that’s actually not as bad as you think it is’.”

She says many women leave comments on her blog saying that her confessional tone makes them feel less alone, or feel “normal” or relieved that someone else is going through very similar times.

The community on realmums.com.au has been so well received by mothers wanting to hear frank and honest experiences of others that 2500 women are now members.

“They find (writing on the forum and blog) humorous or can relate to it. Some are absolutely horrified about some of the things I say — I know I’m not going to appeal to everybody — but I do get comments like, ‘Were you in my house this afternoon?’ ”

Cox has her first, blog-inspired, book coming out soon. Like other mum bloggers, she says that in the time since she began blogging she has learned what she is and is not happy to divulge online, and despite the fact she tries to be as real and true to life as possible, there are things — such as her relationship with her husband — that she chooses not to share.

One blogger who hold little or nothing back is the US blog icon Heather Armstrong. Many women who have taken to their keyboards to discuss daily parenting life, or give advice about to handle it better, or just to share with like-minded souls, use Utah blogger Armstrong as their guiding light.

Dubbed queen of the mummy bloggers by the New York Times earlier this year, Armstrong was sacked from her job with an IT start-up in 2002 after writing satirically about workmates on her personal blog, Dooce. She blogged eloquently about the sacking and life after it, and by 2004 she was receiving 6500 visits a day.

After her first child was born in 2004, and she subsequently blogged about the depression that eventually landed her in hospital, her following boomed. Despite cries of “sell-out” from her avid followers, Armstrong did “monetise” her blog and is estimated to gross $1 million a year.

It is her mix of confession and revelation, humour and honesty, that is said to have helped make the ex-Mormon designer one of the 30 most influential women in media, according to Forbes magazine.

Nuffnang’s David Krupp says that while the Australian mummy-blog scene is “embryonic” compared with that in the US as well as the UK and even parts of Asia, its power is starting to be felt. In the 2 1/2 years since Nuffnang (which places ads on blogs) started in Australia, 3100 bloggers have joined its network, 60 per cent of whom are mum bloggers.

Bloggers, such as mum-of-five Nicole Avery, are not surprised to hear this, because those who have bothered to explore the myriad mum blogs have found there is pretty much a blogger voice to suit everyone.

Unlike Cox’s life-story posts, Avery’s blog, Planning with Children, is a straight information blog about how to schedule and run your home life with children on board.

Avery says that for many women with small children, online relationships formed with bloggers and the online mum community “are filling in the gaps”.

“When you can’t leave the house, it keeps you sane,” she says.

Like other mothers who take time out of work to stay home with children, Avery (whose online handle is The Planning Queen) saw blogging as a way to keep her skills sharp while away from the office, and also to do “something for me” among the chaos of early childhood.

She says the mummy-blog community is so supportive that online mums even helped her with technical advice to fix her site when it crashed in the early days. Her practical strategies have been so popular among her blog readers that she was approached by a publisher: the result is the book Planning with Kids.

Avery says her resource-style blog has a simple aim: “To help you so you can be more organised so you can enjoy parenting more and have more fun.”

It’s an aspiration that has resonated with parents way beyond her home base of Melbourne.

Despite her organised and super-pragmatic Planning Queen facade, Avery says she loves a range of other women’s blog styles and she finds herself often reduced to tears by memoir-blog entries.

“There are a lot of raw writers, with a lot of blogs I read I regularly cry. Some really pull at your heart strings.”

Brunswick mum Jolie Morello, who also runs a popular resource-style blog called Hey Bambini (about dining out with children), agrees that many women are attracted to blogs to hear “authentic” and uncensored stories of other women at similar stages of life.

Morello recommends places where children are welcome but talks openly about “the plates being smashed in restaurants and the babycinos getting thrown on walls”, and the other challenges of trying to mesh a passion for dining with wanting to do things as a family.

Like David Krupp, Morello says the Aussie mum-blogger scene is at the point of taking off in the mainstream, with some mums still hesitant about how much to say online.

“I think it’s still growing,” she says. “Probably we’re still learning and grasping the whole thing. Australian mums are a bit apprehensive about putting their heart on their sleeve for the whole world.” Even so, when they dip into the mum-blog scene they find friendships and support networks made online can extend into the real world.

“I went to a little blog meet-up the other day and there was a mum from Echuca there who said she had no network in Echuca and found that online was a better place to get tips on parenting,” Morello says. “Before I had kids I (too) had no idea these things existed. I had a very basic knowledge of the internet (but now) when it comes to blogging I’ve met so many wonderful mums.”

And the blogosphere is not only helping stay-at-home mums. Blogger Peace Mitchell’s Connect2Mums brings together 5000 business-mums to share the experience of being in their first 12 months of going into business.

North Queensland-based Mitchell says research by Huggies found that 75 per cent of new mothers are thinking about starting a business, and having a place to exchange information with other mumpreneurs is a profitable tool. “You can see where you’re going on the (business) journey, and where to from here, and learn how to cope with all sorts of things you’re doing.”

IF AUSTRALIA were to have a “queen of the mummy bloggers”, one of the contenders would have to be Sydney-based Kerri Sackville.

While she is no Heather Armstrong in terms of reach, the freelance writer has a high profile among her readers and is an energetic (and amusing) tweeter. One look at her revelatory but funny blog Life and Other Crises shows why: Sackville says things about marriage — especially marital sex, or lack of it — parenting and the irritatingly humdrum aspects of a woman’s life post-babies that many may think in private but few would have the guts to put in print.

Like so many other bloggers, she says taking to her keyboard and launching her blog was extremely cathartic at a time of high emotional stress.

“Three weeks before my third child was born, in 2007, my sister and only sibling died; she had been sick a long time,” Sackville says. “I had a new baby and had just lost my sister and had complete writer’s block.

“I had started a work of fiction and couldn’t write a word for about 18 months… it was a really scary time for me.” She read an article about Twitter and started tweeting, then decided to launch a blog. The reception it received gave her the confidence to write a first book, the just released and very funny When My Husband Does the Dishes: a memoir of marriage and motherhood (original title When My Husband Does the Dishes He Wants Sex).

Such is the power of the mummy-blog network that when Sackville launched the book in Sydney in April, 150 people came, including about 70 she had met through Twitter and blogging.

“I had a dozen bloggers fly from interstate,” Sackville says. “I started blogging purely as a writing exercise — I had no idea at all I’d end up in a community.”

Or, as another popular Sydney blogger, Bronwyn Mandile, aka Maxabella, puts it: “The writing is every bit as freeing and wonderful as I thought it would be. The sense of community that blogging offers is even better.

“Who knew there were so many people ‘just like me’ out there?”

Article written by Wendy Tuohy From: Herald Sun July 16, 2011 12:00AM