The History of the Web

On January 30, 2005, the New York Times published an article about mommy blogging to their style section. Rather than frame it’s rise as something interesting or nuanced, the article chose a mostly reductive article, spinning the act of blogging as a reflection of the writer’s narcism. “The baby blog in many cases is an online shrine to self-absorption,” was one of its most pointed criticisms, and one that set the tone for the rest of the article.

The thing about mommy bloggers is that they were used to reacting pretty much in real time to what was happening to them. Across the blogosphere, they woke up to the article, and took to their blogs to respond. The article failed to situate mommy blogging into any sort of larger context, or historical arc, or feign any curiosity. But it did kick off a wave of responses that act as a sort of anthropological record, and give us some insight into what bloggers were thinking at the time.

Here’s what some of those responses looked like.

The Mommy Blog

Melinda Roberts of The Mommy Blog took a level-headed view.

Thanks to the New York Times article on blogging parents confoundingly titled, “Mommy and Me” despite featuring a mention and photos of my buddy Jay, I am now the very first result for searches on “mommy blog” or “mommy blogs” and the fourth for “mindy.” I stopped right there because I didn’t want to know any more. For instance? It creeps me out just a bit to know I have supplanted “Mork and Mindy” fan sites, which used to take up the first bazillion citations.

The first website Roberts ever made was about her kids. She used it to share some pictures of her first born with a small group of family and friends. Shortly after the birth of her second child, she took to the web again. This time in the form of a blog she used to process her thoughts and feelings about the medical problems facing her newborn, and the uncertainty it came with.

Roberts was all too happy to share the ups and downs of raising children. Her blog was a way to collect all the little moments she didn’t want to lose track of. I don’t keep up with the baby books, and I suck at making photo albums,” she would later recall, “but I am GREAT with the computer and am a techy geek at heart.”

As a result she embraced the mommy blog moniker that others tried to distance themselves from. She was, after all, both a mom and a blogger, and quite happy doing both. The web was a place where Roberts built her community. Her small network of friends would eventually expand to a massive following of readers and admirers, and even a book deal and a few chats with Oprah.

There were even parts of the New York Times article that she could sympathize with. One of the criticisms it leveled at mommy blogging was what it would do to the children in years to come, as they came of age and were embarrassed, or horrified by what had been written about them (a concern that seems almost quaint today). Roberts wrote about that anxiety all the time. But that was missing the forest for the trees, she would argue. There was such joy and such community in what she had created, that it was impossible to resist.

“Can anyone please tell me if he will be permanently scarred when he finally reads this?,” she once commented about her child, “Because I am not sure I can stop blogging this funny, funny shit.”

Mimi Smartypants

It’s not easy to trace back the first official “mommy blog”, especially because the label came only after moms had been actively blogging for quite some time. If were to try and pinpoint the first, however, Mimi Smartypants would certainly be on the shortlist. Ms. Smartypants (as she prefers to be called) was interviewed for the New York Times article. Her response is a perfect encapsulation of her style: biting, honest and from the heart:

La da dee dee dee, would someone please tell me what I am supposed to write about in my DIARY if not my own personal LIFE? If I had more energy today I could get good and mad about the story, but on the other hand I think it’s kind of cute how the New York Times thinks that right now is 2001, and that any sort of story on weblogs and online writing qualifies as news. Even “Style” section news.

Mimi Smartypants was started all the way back in 1999, when the web was still very new for most of the world. Her first post, which you can read to this day, was called “unrelated and possibly unillumniating factoids.” Despite what the title would have you believe, it’s actually rather illuminating, and remains a good intro to the decades of writing that would follow.

Like many other bloggers of the time, Ms. Smartypants came to the web because she loved writing. “I write the diary because I enjoy typing, and it’s sort of a release valve, a rush to GET IT ALL DOWN,” Mimi would say years later in an interview. “I feel a weird urge to transcribe the workings of my head, even if it’s only a teeny tiny part of what’s going on.” This urgency comes through in her writing. In fact, reading a post on Mimi Smartypants always feels like being invited to talk a stroll through her inner thoughts, and enjoy an interesting story and a good laugh along the way.

It’s a stylistic choice that is impossible without the willingness to be vulnerable.

It’s a stylistic choice that comes with a healthy dose of vulnerability and honesty. But it is one that many bloggers that followed would attempt to emulate in their own lives. Mimi Smartypants became not only a place for others to see their own experiences reflected back at them, but became the inspiration of a generation of writers looking to chronicle their own thoughts.

Dooce

If there’s one blogger that will get mentioned in the same sentence as mommy blogging, it’s probably Heather Armstrong, who blogged at dooce.com from 2001 until her tragic death in 2023.

Armstrong’s style was direct, and staccato. She’d often post multiple times a day, reacting each time to something else she had written that day, or in weeks previous, or years before. It created something that reads more like a stream of consciousness. And she never held back.

Armstrong came to the web first as a developer, and then as a blogger in 2001. She was brutally honest about her life, to a fault. In fact, her blog made the news early on when she lost her job as a developer after her co-workers and employers had discovered that she was talking about them on her blog.

But rather than let that be the end, Armstrong doubled down and continued to write and reveal all about her life. By 2005, she was an online sensation, often talking about her life, her struggles with mental health, and reflections on her time as member of the church of latter day saints, which she was particularly critical of. Armstrong’s posts would often get in her trouble with one group or another, but she never let it stop her. It only led to more people come to follow her.

Because of how popular the blog was, Dooce was a centerpiece of the Hochman article, and the story led with a picture of Armstrong and her son. But Armstrong was never one to back down, and throughout the day the article was published, she posted to her blog a few times with pithy titles like “NY Times, gateway drug to Playboy,” “Leta, I promise I will pay for ALL of your therapy bills” and “Welcome to my online shrine to parental self-absorption!” She wasn’t going to let this kind of reaction slow her down.

I had a hard time containing my glee — not because I and some of my fellow women writers were made out to be selfish, resentful, overreacting pigs in search of validation; funny that none of us were informed that the article would run with that notion when we were interviewed — but that my child’s green eyes were staring at me from the pages of a national paper.

This wasn’t all that unusual for Dooce, who’s blog was filled with Armstrong’s sense of humor, commentary, and vulnerability.

Fussy

If there’s somebody that summed up the frustration many had with the New York Times article in as few words as possible, it’s probably Eden Marriott Kennedy of Fussy.

Good morning, I’m humorless and resentful, as are many moms who blog. We overscrutinize our children’s every excretion and whore out adorable anecdotes about them just to get attention for ourselves!

Kennedy was a writer her entire life, as a poet, as a journalist, and as an editor. In the early 2000’s, she started exploring blogs that were out there, and it felt like a natural fit. Like many other mommy bloggers, she taught herself some HTML and got a blog up.

In a lot of ways, Kennedy was an open book. She blogged about what made her unique, and her posts were often explorations of her own inner psyche mixed with thoughts on the very nature of parenting, motherhood, and just being a person in the modern world. Many readers found Fussy comforting in the way that it explored everything that surrounded being a parent, not just the act of being a parent itself.

In an interview, Kennedy once said, “people think, diapers and suburban life — who cares? Well, yeah, but a lot of us are living that life, and … we have brains.” She thought it was important for readers to understand that humans are complicated, and no two parents are the same.

BlogHer

By the time the dust had settled on the New York Times article, many mommy bloggers were packing up to go to the first ever BlogHer conference, in Santa Clara, California. About 300 people were in attendance.

During one of the panels, one conference goer tried to make the point that if mommy bloggers stopped talking about themselves so much, they could be the agents of real change. It’s hard to not see the reflection of the article in this response. But the pressure, the growth, and the community of mommy blogging had been incredible. It couldn’t simply be discounted because it followed the trend of all blogs, to be personal and raw. Another blogger, Alice Bradley, stood up in what would eventually become the stuff of legends to proclaim, “mommy blogging is a radical act.”

This became a rallying cry for many in the community, and an encapsulation of what had brought many of them to blogging in the first place. Mommy Blogging continued to rise, and the conference continued for another 15 years.

Mommy blogging gave a lot of space to blogging outside of just tech trends. Along with the war blogging of the early 2000’s, it brought the concept itself into the mainstream. And once parents were able to find their home on the web, more and more flocked to it.