ChasNote

From yesterday’s NY Times:

“Heather Armstrong’s wickedly funny blog about motherhood, Dooce, is more than just an outlet for the creativity and frustrations of a modern mother. The site, chock full of advertising, is a moneymaking machine — so much so that Ms. Armstrong and her husband have both quit their regular jobs…. advertisers are eager to influence the 850,000 readers, mostly women, who avidly follow Ms. Armstrong’s adventures. Although Ms. Armstrong will not disclose exact numbers, Dooce’s revenue this year is on track to be seven times its size in 2006, according to Federated Media, which sells ads for the blog.”

If the Times requires you to register, here’s roughly the same article at IHT.

JCPenney’s Linden Street line has teamed up with a half dozen FM authors to create the Home Style Guide, a group blog that pulls high-style decorating posts — chairs to build a room around or a DIY wood clock, for example — from Craftzine, Cool Mom Picks, Dooce, the Pioneer Woman, NOTCOT and others. JCPenney is the exclusive sponsor of the site (though they don’t control the editorial content), like they were last year on a similar site, FM’s Fall Shopping Guide. Featured Linden Street products are promoted down the left-hand column.

This expansion of the concept JCPenney piloted last fall suggests the “converational marketing” approach is working for them. Additional press on the earlier program:

Abbey Klaassen covered it for Ad Age, which requires registration so here’s a summary at ChasNote.

Steve Rubel gave it props in his year-end round up, from Micropersuasion.

Readers become subscribers, from ChasNote.

Well, I’ll admit that’s not a scientifically-verifiable statement. But it is true that I’ve never before seen a blog post that attracted 42,232 comments — which is the number of comments posted by Dooce readers in response to Heather’s post about her Wii Fit party.

Emily Bazelon ponders the ethics of blogging about your kids (see Slate), and gets some advice from Dooce’s Heather Armstrong:

“Armstrong’s approach is a common one among parent-scribes: You caricature your kid a bit, picking out his funny or more outrageous habits, but your parenting struggles are the real subject, and you’re the butt of all the jokes. (And your spouse is the font of all wisdom, on the theory that flattery helps.) You mine your kid for material, but you tell yourself that certain categories of behavior are off-limits.”

ABC’s Nightline profiles Heather, her site, her dog Chuck, her new book and her sidekick Jon.

Heather Armstrong, author of Dooce, has published her first book, a collection of essays (two contributed by Heather) called Things I Learned About My Dad. Congrats, Heather. I look forward to digging in to what, I’m guessing, will be the first of many books of yours I will read in the years to come.

The collection includes essays from some of my other favorites (and, full disclosure, FM partners) as well: James Griffioen from Sweet Juniper, Doug French from Laid-Off Dad, Alice Bradley from Finslippy and Maggie Mason from Mighty Goods.

From Thursday’s Personal Journal.

“The 32-year-old at-home mother’s irreverent, occasionally profane and often hilarious musings on prosaic topics from potty-training to postpartum depression have propelled her blog, Dooce.com, to No. 59 among the Web’s top 100 blogs, according to Technorati, a blog search engine. The Salt Lake City resident enjoys enviable influence and enough ad revenue that her husband Jon quit his job in 2005 to manage advertising for Dooce (rhymes with moose).”

The Guardian UK is out with their list of favorite 50 blogs, including several official “friends of FM”:

Boing Boing: “Their dominance of the terrain where technology meets politics makes the Boing Boing crew geek aristocracy.”

TechCrunch: “Techcrunch began in 2005 as a blog about dotcom start-ups in Silicon Valley, but has quickly become one of the most influential news websites across the entire technology industry.”

Dooce: “Though there were personal websites that came before hers, certain elements conspired to make Dooce one of the biggest public diaries since Samuel Pepys’s (whose diary is itself available, transcribed in blog form, at Pepysdiary.com).”

Mashable: “Founded by Peter Cashmore in 2005, Mashable is a social-networking news blog, reporting on and reviewing the latest developments, applications and features available in or for MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and countless lesser-known social-networking sites and services, with a special emphasis on functionality.”

Gaping Void: “Things started going gangbusters when he pimped his cartoons on the internet, and as he built an audience through his blog, he started writing about his other passion — the new world of understanding how to adapt marketing to the new world of the net.”

Heather Armstrong of Dooce picked up several honors at the 2008 Bloggies, including Best American Weblog, Best-Designed Weblog, Weblog of the Year, and Lifetime Achievement. Congrats, Heather!

Ree of Confessions of a Pioneer Woman took home Best Writing of a Weblog and (for her other site, Pioneer Woman Cooks) Best Food Weblog. Go, Ree!

As part of HP’s continued efforts to make websites and blogs more printable, and to get customers more comfortable with printing projects in general, they’ve sponsored the photo sections of parenting sites such as Dooce and Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. Here’s the masthead at Dooce, where HP invites readers to share their own pet photos.

The Pioneer Woman hosts frequent “Give That Photo A Name” contests. Today’s installment solicited nearly 3000 comments in around six hours. (Yes, 3000 reader comments attached to a single post.) The lead-in to today’s contest, the Pioneer Woman alerts her readers to the new functionality added to her site as part of HP’s sponsorship: “Before I show you the prize, have you noticed the little ‘Print Pioneer Woman Photos’ blurb in my nav bar above? Here. Let me show you.” Followed by these screenshots:

Conversational marketing can be this simple. Simple yet well situated — right in the thick of an engaged conversation among 3000 web-savvy moms.