Back to (Blog) Basics

I have a confession to make -- I've lost my focus a little over the past few months.

Way back when Baby Girl (now almost three -- how did that happen) was knee high to a grasshopper, I decided to start up a web site to capture the information I had had trouble finding as a new mom. Something along the lines of the Urban Baby boards out of the US where women could ask each other everything from who is a good pediatrician in their area to is it really OK if your baby starts crying in one of those mom/baby movies (answer: yes). My web goddess best friend at Two Roads Marketing helped me figure out what a "host" was and set me up with a good (and cheap) one. I looked at the website as a way to help other moms -- to thank the moms who had helped me in those terrible early days and to pay it forward just a little (I'm a big believer in karma). Today T.O. Mama has grown through word of mouth and there is a thriving user-run community chat board where women share exactly the type of information I was looking for when I was a new mum. I'm pretty proud of it, actually.

At the same time I launched T.O. Mama, I found that I had a lot of things to say. So I used a little corner of my website to write about the issues that were weighing on my mind but were rarely mentioned in mainstream parenting magazines. I talked about Breastfeeding Bullies, maternal depression and how I was struggling to embrace motherhood as easily as the women seemed to on TLC's A Baby Story.  I assumed that nobody was reading me but it felt better to get these things off my chest and out into the ether.

Eventually Google found me and every once in a while I'd receive an email from someone who had found comfort from one of my posts. I remembered how grateful I'd been when reading Andi Buchanan's Mother Shock and Faulkner Fox's Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life and was happy to return the favour. I started to write more regularly and I starting using blogging software to organize my posts. But I did not consider myself a blogger and was blissfully unaware of incoming links or technorati status or blogrolls.

I was drawn into a wonderful circle of mother writers. Andi got me involved at Literary Mama. Through Andi I connected with Miriam Peskowitz whose wonderful book The Truth About the Mommy Wars is a must read (we will meet at ARM this fall). I met the wonderful Ann Douglas (throughout my pregnancy, I hung onto her every word and it amazes me that I now email her casually AND SHE ANSWERS!) I talked with the Star's lovely Andrea Gordon. I started to read those who commented regularly on my blog even when I had nothing much to say: Sharon, Sandy, Diana, Jenn, Staci and so many others and the brave souls without a url who comment nonetheless (Diana, Katie, I'm thinking especially of you). I'd name you all but I'd ineviatably forget someone critical and then, well, we all know how well that worked out for Hillary Swank. I met the bloggers who I read every day, even the days when I don't have time to apply a coat of fresh lipgloss. Marla. Andrea. Dani. (I've only met Marla in the flesh but that did not stop us from pulling together a panel presentation for ARM).  I've eaten kulfi with Kate. The Dude has barfed on Scarbiedoll. And because we have read each other's innermost secrets, there is none of that weird gameplaying or jockeying for position that sometimes goes on in untested friendships. We know that we all have demons and can just get on with talking about stuff that matters instead of wasting daylight giving each other the Manhattan Once Over whenever we meet. Because of my wonderful early experiences online, I honestly thought that the blogosphere would bring about the type of consciousness raising practices that would drive the feminist and mothering movement forward and would function as a virtual living room where mothers could rap about the problems within the current system and brainstorm ways to solve them.

But then something happened. I wrote a post titled "Tom Cruise is an idiot" at the exact moment that Tom Cruise became an idiot and suddenly all sorts of traffic was being driven to my site (for a while I was the number one listing when one googled "Tom Cruise Idiot"). I was asked if quotes from my blog could be used for a tv program. One guy was interested in doing a documentary about me. My name was occasionally mentioned in the press. I received offers of free product like cleaners and portraits and luxury baby blankets (I turned down everything but free books -- turning down advanced copies of books I'd planned to buy anyways seemed like the dictionary definition of dumb). I started to think about blogging more strategically. I started to think about visitors and links and my network. And suddenly, blogging was starting to seem a lot like a business.

Certainly, the blogosphere is much more commercial these days (the current Bus 2.0 cover article confirmed my suspicions) than it was when I started out. No longer is it the funny little homegrown network I fell into nearly three year ago. Someone has discovered that there is money to be made in blogs and bloggers, no fools they, are jumping on board. A lot of the big blogging networks may have started out as a means of community building but now they are big business. (Jason McCabe Calacanis, co-founder and CEO of Weblogs, Inc., summarized his decision to sell his company to AOL for $25 million: “Weblogs has made great strides over the past two years building high-profile blogs. Yet, we realized that taking our network to the next level required a partner not only with a significant audience, but the advertising expertise to leverage it.") A number of corporate websites now employ bloggers to help them build a relationship with their customers (read: make them want to buy more stuff). There are businesses that focus on designing blogs. There are conferences for bloggers which attract major corporate sponsors. A number of well-known bloggers are now blogging for the big-for-profit sites. The idea of being paid to blog certainly is a seductive one and one I've considered strongly. And I certainly do not think badly of any blogger who receives remuneration for her work (in fact, I think that as more and more people get paid to blog, it will become more democratic and less a hobby of the middle and upper middle classes).  But one of the great things about the blogosphere in its infancy is that is was free from advertising and corporate meddling. It offered us something that other media channels didn't. Those days, I fear, are all but gone. (And yes, I've read all of the verbiage about advertisers not having an impact on content. But their patronage does complicate the blog conversation just a little, because it's a little like trying to have a serious conversation with a good friend with a guy from P&G sitting in the corner, taking notes.)

Content used to read as raw and fresh, no one was trying to sell you something or increase their site traffic. There was collaboration among bloggers, not competition, because, well, there was nothing to compete over. But now, money and fame has entered into the equation and because we bloggers, enemy of the ad-driven mass media, are not supposed to be thinking of this like a business, we hide our underlying intentions. Instead of competing directly for market share, for advertising dollars, for readers, and then sitting down to have a friendly beer at the end of the day, we seem to be doing the frenemy thing and write mean comments and parody blogs and leave throwaway comments designed simply to promote our own urls. It's a trend that threatens the very goodness of the blogophere: Goodbye Children's Television Workshop; hello Maury Povich.

I left the business world for a reason. Right now, at this point in my life, I do not want the stress. I do not want the competition (even if it is only with myself). I do not want to have to think strategically. I do not want to question if I am getting to know people because I like them or because it might be a good opportunity for me somewhere down the road. So instead, I'm going back to basics. Back to what I loved about blogging at the very beginning. Before I even knew what blogging was and simply wrote funny little rants as a means of cheap therapy and helping someone going through the same thing to know that she's not alone. I've removed my blogroll and my site meter. I'll write about what is on my mind and I'll continue to link to those who are near and dear to my heart in my posts. And I'll continue to run T.O. Mama, free from advertising, for as long as I can. And, yes, I realize that it is a luxury to be able to work like this and do not judge anyone who chooses a different path.

I'm also going to be blogging over at Literary Mama a lot more this fall. Literary Mama has a real commitment to promoting voices of mother writers who offer a different perspective than that offered in the mainstream media and I'm going to do my part to promote mother writers who blog. I'll also be doing a whole lot more of that on my blog.

I may do something fun for profit at some point. But it will be clear that it is a business. I will not be employing guerilla marketing techniques nor dressing it up as something it is not.

So I'm not leaving the blogosphere, even though over the summer it has been tempting to do so. Instead, I'm simply redefining it on my own terms. I want to carve out a tiny corner of the blogosphere for honest, agenda-free conversation and I hope you'll join with me.