Dooce

To close out Mom Weekend here on Today on the Interwebs, we have the mother of all mom blogs, Dooce.com!

Dooce is an old-school blog with a fresh face. It is the personal blog of Heather B. Armstrong, who writes under the pseudonym "Dooce." She explains she got that nickname from her inability to quickly spell "dude" during IM chats with her former co-workers.

Her blog is old-school because in ye olden days of the Internets, personal blogs like this ran amok. They were focused on promoting the author and/or chronicled the authors' daily life in an open-diary format. This practice stopped because most authors are pretty boring; Heather Armstrong is not. She keeps her blog fresh with witty prose, daily photos, and new mastheads every month.

Dooce.com used to be about Heather and her work, until she got fired. In her own words:

I started this website in February 2001. A year later I was fired from my job for this website because I had written stories that included people in my workplace. My advice to you is BE YE NOT SO STUPID. Never write about work on the internet unless your boss knows and sanctions the fact that YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT WORK ON THE INTERNET. If you are the boss, however, you should be aware that when you order Prada online and then talk about it out loud that you are making it very hard for those around you to take you seriously.

This allegedly spawned a term. Supposedly. According to UrbanDictionary.com, getting "dooced" means "to lose one’s job because of one’s website." Now that's a source! If you ask me, if it's on Urban Dictionary it might as well get placed in the Smithsonian.

Don't feel too sorry about her losing her job though. Nowadays Dooce.com is now about Heather's life as a self-described "Stay at Home Mom (SAHM) or a Shit Ass Ho Motherfucker," both of which she claims to do equally well. She started running ads on her site in October of 2005, and it now generates enough revenue for her to support her family. Heather sums up her transition from web designer to jobless drunk to professional blogger (wait... did I just state the same thing twice?):

This website chronicles my life from a time when I was single and making a lot of money as a web designer in Los Angeles, to when I was dating the man who would become my husband, to when I lost my job and lived life as an unemployed drunk, to when I married my husband and moved to Utah, to when I became pregnant, to when I threw up and became unbearably swollen during the pregnancy, to the birth, to the aftermath, to the postpartum depression that landed me in a mental hospital. I’m better now.

Her blog won THREE 2008 Weblog Awards: best-designed blog, blog of the year, and a lifetime achievement award. (I swear I did not make that up, those are real awards.) Anyway, you wish your mom was this hip.

Enjoy a sampling of entries:
1. Dooce gets dooced.
2. Dooce talks about her post-partum depression
3. Dooce's daughter Leta can't poop.

(From Wired and Wikipedia)