Another chore added to mom's list: the blog

No matter the day or the time, no matter where you are or who you are, for that matter, you can peek inside the life of Carmen Staicer, mother of six children in Virginia Beach.

Last Tuesday, for instance:

"It's summer time. It's hot and muggy and most of the time, it's very smoky here, thanks to wildfires in my state and the next. I'm already on edge, and, seriously, kids - cut it out. Or I'll be forced to send you to your rooms at 6 p.m. Wait - can I be sent to MY room? Leave them to duke it out amongst themselves, fight to the death?"

Staicer, 38, is what's known in the Internet world as a "mommy blogger," and if you think chronicling the trials of your children's summer vacation on a blog doesn't count for much, you'd be wrong.

Collectively the global network of mom bloggers has major purchasing power that is attracting advertisers. Staicer has grabbed the attention of some big names, including Johnson & Johnson and Hanes. Companies such as General Motors, Disney and Sony have also been eager to ply mothers' opinions and harness their valuable word of mouth.

Thirty-six million women a week now either write or read a blog, according to a study commissioned this year by BlogHer, a company that publishes women-authored blogs and sells advertising space on them. Out of 15,000 blogs in its directory, some 3,600 fall in the "mommy and family" category, and most of them were started in the past three years.

That's enough to be viewed by a lot of politicians as the new "soccer moms."

One of the most popular mommy bloggers in America, Utah mother Heather Armstrong gets an estimated

4 million page views a month on her blog at Dooce.com, so much that the advertising and product reviews she does can support her family.

Of course, that's not the experience of most mommy bloggers, who usually do it as a creative outlet or a way to keep friends and family updated.

There's Psycho Super Mom and Mommy Needs a Cocktail and C razymumma and A Dingo Ate My Baby and It's Not All Mary Poppins.

The most successful bloggers aren't necessarily "the perfect mothers" who can tell you how to pack the best school lunches.

Rather, they're the ones who are irreverent, edgy, humorous. Some are particularly insightful about experiences like raising an autistic teen or surviving the death of a child. And those who reveal intimate details about their lives can appeal to the innate voyeurism of readers: laid-off husbands and postpartum depression, tiffs with the mother-in-law and children who step on their last nerve.

Staicer recently posted about her husband, who will be caring for their children - ages 4 through 16 - while she attends a BlogHer convention in California later this month:

"The man works, no lie, a minimum of thirteen hours a day. Sometimes he works fifteen or sixteen hours a day. He is not used to being with the family. HIS words. Not mine. He has a very vague idea of what daily care of a family involves. Again, HIS words, not mine. He enjoys his days off because of the work I do in the background - the cooking, the cleaning, the doctor appts, the school stuff. He has said this to me."

And while she is as blunt as she is funny, she has learned the hard way to censor herself, to be careful or stay away entirely from mentioning relatives and friends and co-workers and teachers and a teenage son.

It can be a tough balance, sometimes, between enticing faceless readers in cyberspace and keeping peace on the home front.

Staicer started writing her Mom to the Screaming Masses blog about five years ago as a way of expressing her thoughts. At first she had a small number of readers, but one connection led to another, and three years ago, she scored her first advertisement on her site.

The more she wrote, the more she read, the more people she met in the blogosphere. When she lost 80 pounds, she started another blog on diet and fitness, theelffdiet.com.

She recently started blogging on Deep South Moms, which grew out of a network of bloggers called Silicon Valley Moms. Other subgroups of that enclave are Chicago Moms, 50-Something Moms and DC Metro Moms.

All this blogging adds up to more readers.

"I went from five daily readers - most of them shared my DNA - to 1,500 a day," Staicer said.

Blogging is not just about writing, but about reading other people's blogs too, gauging the hot topics of the day, leaving comments you hope will connect with other readers and widening the network.

It takes her a couple of hours a day.

Her readership and advertising, though, have led to requests from companies to review their products. For instance, she recently received free underwear and socks from Hanes for her entire family in exchange for a report on the Parent Bloggers Review.

In April, Johnson & Johnson flew Staicer and other well-read mommy bloggers to New Jersey to attend "Camp Baby." The moms received limo rides to the airport, free airline tickets, gourmet meals and lodging in exchange for feedback about Johnson & Johnson products.

Other companies have sought her blogging power and ad space, including toy manufacturers, children's book publishers and refrigerator companies. Staicer has enjoyed the perks of the trade and the connections with others across the globe, but it's not enough to quit her part-time job in a school cafeteria.

"My first check for an ad was for $26, " she said. She estimates that she makes a couple of hundred dollars a month through blogging.

Plus, the more people who read her, the harder it is to work out personal struggles on line. In the early days of her blog, readers needed a password to view it.

In Chesapeake, fellow blogger Stephanie Himel-Nelson writes under the moniker Lawyer Mama on her own site and in the DC Metro Moms enclave.

The 35-year-old lawyer estimates she blogs about an hour a day, usually after her two children go to bed, to a regular readership of 200 to 300.

She has a more political bent, which led her to be invited to be part of a blog called Mom ocrats, a group of Democratic moms who write about politics, health care, the environment and other subjects close to their hearts.

Himel-Nelson sees blogging women as an important political force. Presidential candidate Barack Obama, for instance, recently sat down with BlogHer women to answer policy questions, and Elizabeth Edwards had a live blog session with Silicon Valley Moms when her husband, John, was still running in the primaries.

Both Himel-Nelson and Staicer are headed to the

BlogHer convention in San Francisco July 18 through 20, where they will meet and network with fellow bloggers.

Which, yes, could lead to more connections and more blogs and more hits.

It's virtually viral.

Both women concede there's a down side to blogging, for instance when relatives or friends take offense.

Himel-Nelson recently wrote about feedback she received from a post about an old boyfriend:

"Even though no one except the individuals involved would be able to identify the characters in my story, I was accused of, let's see, being stuck in the, 'it's all about ME' stage of life; never maturing past the adolescent years; writing about things that I shouldn't; sharing things that I shouldn't; and acting in ways I never would in a face to face situation. By people who haven't seen or spoken to me in 20 years.

"Of course, none of this was said directly to me or written to me in an email. As is typical in the passive aggressive world of blogging, the insults were hurled from a blog post. Making me feel as if I were in junior high once again with the mean girls dropping notes on my desk. Still, ouch."

Himel-Nelson said there's a saying among bloggers, "don't feed the trolls," which means to ignore negative posts, but she has a hard time doing that.

"I'm a lawyer; I don't like to back down," she said with a laugh.

Plus, everyone knows, more juicy posts, more hits, more comments, more readers.

And that's what makes the blogging world go 'round.

Elizabeth Simpson, (757) 446-2635, elizabeth.simpson@pilotonline.com