This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
There's a battle brewing in the world of "mommy blogs" - and Salt Lake City's own Heather "Dooce" Armstrong in in the middle of it. The Tribune's tech reporter Vince Horiuchi has the details:
When you think of the word "Mommy," you conjure images of caring, polite, Donna Reed lookalikes who bring you warm cookies and milk.
But a vile Twitter tiff, full of the kind of vitriol reserved for Mel Gibson and his ex, has erupted Thursday between two competing "mommy blogs," and it's gotten that sector of the blogosphere into a bit of an uproar.
Mommy bloggers? More like "Mommie Dearest."
One one side is Salt Lake City's nationally-recognized queen of the mommy blogs, Heather Armstrong, whose Dooce.com has become an Internet sensation. The other is a Los Angeles mommy blogger named Anna Viele, who has spent some of her virtual ink on her site, abdpbt.com, blasting Armstrong for all sorts of things.
Armstrong said for years she has ignored the critical musings of Viele, but Thursday was the last straw when Viele questioned whether Armstrong's recent trip to see the conditions in Bangladesh were earnest or because she thinks Yahoo! sponsored the trip.
Armstrong spent five days touring Bangladesh with her friend, former supermodel Christy Turlington Burns, to see the extreme conditions of poverty there. Armstrong said she has come back from the experience a changed woman. (She has written two posts on the trip, here and here.)
"I'm looking at these conditions, and it's monsoon season, and it's pouring rain, and I see the kids there," Armstrong told me on the phone Thursday. "I saw the conditions these people were living in, and it's beyond imagination. It's really made me take a hard look on how I want to use my platform and what else I can do."
But news of her trip raised concerns for one reporter. In a column, Rowan Davies of the British paper The Guardian questioned the sincerity of such "poverty tourism" engaged by bloggers, especially if they are sponsored trips paid for by companies.
"Blogging trips risk being little more than groovy PowerPoint slides in the campaign department's next quarterly report," she wrote.
Armstrong hit the roof with that article and told Davies so in her Twitter feed, calling it "shoddy journalism."
That's when Viele stepped in. Referencing the Guardian article, Viele tweeted: "Honestly, I was on the fence about bloggers and poverty tourism before today. Now I'm strongly against it."
That was just the first of many tweets from Viele, who then questioned whether Yahoo! sponsored Armstrong's trip. (Armstrong disclosed that Yahoo! is sponsoring her series of posts on the trip and will donate money to her favorite charity.)
Armstrong was furious at Viele, and it just went downhill from there.
Armstrong said she paid for her trip, not Yahoo!, and she was doing it because she wanted to get into charity work. The problems in Bangladesh came to her attention when Turlington Burns visited Salt Lake City.
A Twitter battle has erupted between the two, with Armstrong calling Viele an Internet troll and Viele calling Armstrong disingenuous. The rest from both sides can't be repeated in a family newspaper. But we're talking about a large Twitter audience on hand to see the virtual slapping - Armstrong has more than 1.5 million Twitter followers.
Now it seems everyone in the mommy blogosphere is chiming in, and that segment of Twitter is lighting up with all kinds of opinions about the flame war between the moms.
"Ahhh! The mommy bloggers are fighting on twitter. Anyone else loyally follow Dooce? cuz this just got good," wrote one tweeter in Atlanta.
Armstrong said she finally had to say something about her rival's criticisms because she claims Viele has been relentlessly attacking for years not only her but her other friends who blog.
"Whenever I respond to a criticism, people say you really have to ignore it. I get criticized hourly and I ignore all of it," she said. "This instance is different because she has mocked my charity work and my friends' charity work, and this has got to stop."
In an email to the Tribune, Viele said Thursday "It's not reasonable for anyone, especially a celebrity, to expect to never be criticized or have people ask questions about what they're doing. In fact, when it comes to charity work, the responsible thing to do is to ask how and why funds are being spent and how exactly people are being helped."
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