Living out loud in public, for better or worse

R.I.P. Heather Armstrong

The death of Heather Armstrong, so-called “queen of the mommy bloggers”, launched a flood of associations and memories. It already feels so long ago. 2002, the early wave of blogging, the year I started my own blog. It was a frontier time. Nobody knew what blogs were. People would say, “What’s a blog?” I was irritated by the word “blog”, so in general I called my blog a “site” in a meaningless act of protest. Heather, aka “Dooce”, made it big, as big as you can make it as a blogger. (Okay, maybe the Pioneer Woman, with her Walmart line of cookware - NOT made in the U.S.A., not very pioneer-like, eh? and flowy clothing and television show, has reached the pinnacle. I read Pioneer Woman before she became the “brand” she is today, back when she was just a blogger, eccentric, funny, interesting.).