ChasNote

According to this tweet from Daring Fireball’s John Gruber:

Don’t mess with Dooce!

To promote her upcoming book, It Sucked and Then I Cried, Heather’s hitting the road for a book tour. Dates and cities here

The Our TV Picks section of the Fancast site features an eclectic batch of TV show reviews (from sci fi classics to sexy superheroes to contemporary reality TV) by writers from Boing Boing, Dooce, NOTCOT and Ask A Ninja. FM helped put all the pieces together.

Comcast is running banner ads on those same sites, with clips from the authors’ show reviews.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that ads, for example, on Dooce featuring an excerpt of more Dooce content would drive click-through rates that can be counted in whole numbers. But what can I say — I’m an old-fashioned guy who continues to be impressed by CTRs above 1% on banners that are SFW.

UPDATE 12/10: Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing explains to her readers how the sponsorship works:

“A disclaimer, in the interest of transparent über-sharing: I was paid to write these posts, and the site is an online video hub run by Comcast.

“I wasn’t told what to write about or not write about, and my work wasn’t edited or modified in any way, so I picked freaky stuff I genuinely liked, and in a few cases, had some sort of personal connection with.”

Uber-well done, Xeni and Comcast!

(Credits: Robin D’agostino at Comcast Interactive Media, and Michael Cohn and John Shankman at FM.)

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).”