Alpha Mummy - Times Online - WBLG

Twitter report: the best family travel tweeters

I've reviewed for the Times travel section the best folks on Twitter who are writing about their own trips, travel tips and pictures that take you away from it all.

Check out the story here if you missed it.

When pitches to mummy bloggers go bad

Micahel sent in a link to the Ackermania blog, which has a great story about receiving pitches from clueless PR folks. (She knows whence she speaks, being a PR person herself.) Check it out.

Are mummy bloggers taking over the world?

 Well, maybe. In case you missed it, here is the link to my piece that is in today's T2 section, about the growing influence and commercial power of mummy (and daddy) bloggers.

I had loads more interesting material from all the people who kindly agreed to be interviewed. And of course ideally I would have liked to interview all the AM regulars who blog about parenthood, but we just ran out of time and room.

In any case, I 'd love to hear ya'lls thoughts - adulatory and critical! - about the piece. Let me know what you think. 

Playing tag: Alpha Mummy's answers

A Modern Mother has tagged me. Here are the rules of the meme: Respond and rework. Answer questions on your own blog. Replace one question. Add one question. Tag other bloggers.

So here goes:

1. What are your current obsessions?
Twitter, watching all the episodes of Life on Mars, planning all holidays for the rest of the year

2. Which item from your wardrobe do you wear most often?
My brown tweed slip-on Sketchers

3. What was your favourite childhood meal?
baked cod with macaroni cheese and green beans.

4. Last thing you bought?
A pair of vegetarian mary jane shoes (no leather) and a bottle of boric acid

5. What are you listening to?
The soundtrack from Amelie

6. If you were a god/goddess who would you be?
Artemis - has a nice ring and "goddess of the hunt" sounds empowering

7. Favourite holiday spots?
Port Aransas, Texas; anywhere in France, the Cotswolds

8. Reading right now?
The Mumpreneur Diaires, The Shining, the Art of the Personal Essay 

9. Four words to describe yourself.
Tired. Type A. Red-haired.

10. Guilty pleasure?
Nachos with cheese, guacamole, sour cream and jalapenos.

11. Who or what makes you laugh until you’re weak?
Jokes my husband tells me. I laugh til I cry.

12. Favourite spring thing to do?
Bicycling in nature.

13. Planning to travel to next?
Paris with a friend and our daughters.

14. Best thing you ate or drank lately?
A cherry cocktail at Roka restaurant.

15. When did you last get tipsy?
Last night.

16. Favourite ever film?
Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet

17. Care to share some wisdom?
This too shall pass

18. Song you can't get out of your head?
Peeeeeeeppa pig! dee-da-dee-da dadada-dee-da.

19. One thing you'd really like to do this year? Do a thrill sport - ballooning, whitewater rafting, etc.

So, who to send this to next?

The Mumprenuer Diaries

Littlemummy.com

Dulwich Divorcee

6. If you were a god/goddess who would you be?
Artemis - has a nice ring and "goddess of the hunt" sounds empowering

7. Favourite holiday spots?
Port Aransas, Texas; anywhere in France, the Cotswolds

8. Reading right now?
The Mumpreneur Diaires, The Shining, the Art of the Personal Essay 

9. Four words to describe yourself.
Tired. Type A. Red-haired.

10. Guilty pleasure?
Nachos with cheese, guacamole, sour cream and jalapenos.

11. Who or what makes you laugh until you’re weak?
Jokes my husband tells me. I laugh til I cry.

12. Favourite spring thing to do?
Bicycling in nature.

13. Planning to travel to next?
Paris with a friend and our daughters.

14. Best thing you ate or drank lately?
A cherry cocktail at Roka restaurant.

15. When did you last get tipsy?
Last night.

16. Favourite ever film?
Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet

17. Care to share some wisdom?
This too shall pass

18. Song you can't get out of your head?
Peeeeeeeppa pig! dee-da-dee-da dadada-dee-da.

19. One thing you'd really like to do this year? Do a thrill sport - ballooning, whitewater rafting, etc.

So, who to send this to next?

The Mumprenuer Diaries

Littlemummy.com

Dulwich Divorcee

57 Twitter tips for mummy bloggers

Tweeting is the new blogging or Twitter is the new black. Or maybe it's over already since Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher are doing it. But one genuinely exciting thing about the micro-blogging/social networking trend is that it can help promote your blog and get readers. Here's how to attract followers, get re-tweeted and otherwise make Twitter a powerful extension of your mummy blogging life.

10 tips on how to use Twitter as a twool - invaluable advice from Guy Kawasaki, the influential man behind Alltop, the online magazine rack

8 tips on how to get retweeted

10 ways to build community on Twitter

10 things not to do - reasons why people won't follow you on Twitter

How to spot a fake follower - Plus, check out Twitter's list of high-profile fake accounts

Can't wrap your head around Twitter? See it in its purest form (people talking about their feelings) on http://twistori.com/. Click on a word and see tweets from other people that contain those words.

Plus here are some bonus blogging tips:

7 tips on how to generate buzz around your blog - These tips are positioned for business websites but they work in generating heat and light around your own blog as well. From Emanuel Rosen is the author of the national bestseller The Anatomy of Buzz (Doubleday, 2000) and The Anatomy of Buzz Revisited: Real-life lessons in Word-of-Mouth Marketing (Doubleday, 2009).

10 tips to overcome blogger's block

When OCD is beautiful

Just ran across the blog Polymer Clay Snails, written by a New York mum and featuring this photo.

She writes:

He does this to items he has 3 or more of … without fail … he just can’t help himself

Visit the blog to see more pictures and posts.

Get your blog featured on a parenting website

Looking for more exposure for your mummy or daddy blog?

Education and parenting website MyChild.co.uk would love to hear from you. If you'd like to take part in their search for mummy and daddy bloggers of the week, just drop Tara (the editor) a line at editorial@mychild.co.uk and visit My Child to have a look at all the previous bloggers of the week.

Mummy bloggers: how does your site rank?

Since so many of AM regulars also blog in their own right, I'm going to start passing along tools and tidbits that help blog more effectively. I'll also be tweeting about these, so sign up for the Alphamummy twitter or my own twitter at JHowze.

The latest tool I've come across is the HubSpot's Website Grader - you plug in your blog's URL then it gives you tips on how to raise its ranking to get as close to as 100 as possible (and thus get more readers!).

Find it here and let us know how your blog ranks and what you're changing. Alpha Mummy needs to tweak our meta tags and meta description, apparently.

Update: One of our Times search gurus gives this report a thumbs-up, "Very easy to use, to the point and mostly correct!"

Women bloggers face sexist atmosphere online

The blogosphere is no place for a lady. Or any woman, really, if she minds being accused of "cat fighting" or being called bitch or worse by the people who read her blog. Women bloggers face a more hostile climate online than men, a group agreed during a town-hall style meeting at this week's SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, and they aim to do something about it.

Attendees sat in chairs and on the floor for an hourlong session at the festival, which showcases and discusses the latest digital trends. Rebecca Fox, a blogger and managing editor for New York-based mediabistro.com, along with Rachel Sklar, a former Huffington Post columnist who now writes for The Daily Beast, led the session, entitled.  Why Is Professional Blogging Bloodsport for Women?

Name-calling and denigrating outspoken women creates a sexist climate online, says Fox. "The consensus was that there’s a very gendered critique," going on when it comes to female bloggers, says Fox. One woman at the session, who blogs for the New York Times, described receiving an email saying she should be taken out back and shot in the forehead.

Nasty sexist criticism of women bloggers that goes beyond the subject of their posts has been a hot button issue for some time. In 2007 influential developer and blogger Kathy Sierra cancelled speaking engagements and suspended her blog after receiving death threats. She spoke of the attacks as motivated by the fact that she is a woman in a male-dominated field.

"If you want to do something about it, do not tolerate the kind of abuse that includes threats or even suggestions of violence (especially sexual violence). Do not put these people on a pedestal. Do not let them get away with calling this "social commentary", "protected speech", or simply "criticism"," she wrote on her blog.

Robert Scoble, an influential technology blogger, condemned the campaign, and noted instances of sexism on his blog as well.

"…Whenever I post a video of a female technologist there invariably are snide remarks about body parts and other things that simply wouldn't happen if the interviewee were a man," he said.

But is this just an example of the Internet's anonymity allowing individuals to say outrageous things with impunity? Fox doesn't think so. Rather she sees the criticism as an extension of real-world sexism, where "it’s good to be quiet as a woman but when you are vocal, it’s not good. It’s not polite or appropriate."

And while women bloggers frequently write about their personal lives, Fox dismisses notions that women are simply opening themselves up to personal criticism more online. In an interview with the Austin Chronicle, she said:

"When he was at Gawker, blogger Alex Balk wrote in the character of 'My Cock' for more than a year and still blogs about his affinity for blow jobs, yet he's like the Teflon man when it comes to how the blogosphere collectively regards his writing," Fox says.

In the same article, Sklar said:

"Putting yourself out there about personal moments, especially controversial – making the decision to have an abortion, documenting a bruising experience in a relationship – when you put these kinds of internal monologues online, they become dialogues, and often people think they have the right to say whatever they want about it," Sklar says. "And hey, you put it online, so they pretty much do. But it's the responses to these discussions that are interesting. Experiences that are particular to women are usually marginalized as such, and ther'es an implicit dismissal of that from the larger conversation."

Several attendees at the SXSW session pointed to the name-calling and shouting down opinionated women bloggers as part of the continuum of sexism in society at large.

Yet women make a up a large and growing proportion of the blogosphere. A 2008 study by women's online network BlogHer showed that approximately 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogosphere every week, with 15.1 million publishing at least one post a week and 21.1 million reading and commenting.

"People in the room agreed that there’s a weight to a lot of the voices of women in the blogosphere and were they to unify themselves with something like this, it could do a lot to let people know when misogyonistic responses were happening and that’s not ok, says Fox.

To change the online climate for women, bloggers need to actively support other - by posting comments on each other's blogs, point out when critiques cross the line, there was even talk of using a tag - #webfem - to telegraph to the larger community the effort to get misogyny out of the conversation.

"If I’m noticing a vitriolic sort of stream of comments on a female bloggers post, [the hash tag is a way] to jump into the fray and say this is sounding like a sexist kind of thing - to just be more engaged in that way and to help cultivate an environment where it’s not acceptable. We have to aim for parity," says Fox.

What's your experience online? Do you think women are criticised more harshly for their opinions online?

Credit crunch tips from mums

The latest mummy blogging carnival has gone up (carnival = a round-up of the best recent posts from mummy blogs) with a credit crunch theme. Some of the posts included in the carnival are like rabbit holes - you just keep following links in them, finding more and more interesting stuff.

I just found this video below linked to from the first carnival entry, about reducing the amount you throw away by going on a rubbish diet. The video shows an easy way to make seed pots from empty toilet paper rolls. Now that my bulbs are coming up, I'm motivated to do more gardening. Brilliant.

Check out all the posts on the carnival, hosted by Nixdminx.