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(This post was in response to the bloggers running around flipping out and was not the original blog post)

Who knew something  that started on our FNL about blogger burnout would take the little old blogosphere by viral posting storm today. And I didn’t even try. How disappointing.

Listen up whiny babies of the blogosphere: If your afraid to take a WEEK, a WEEK off of PR blogging, then you have a PROBLEM.  Call it an addiction if you will, but you should stop sniffing the free snack cake train ASAP.

The best part, other than being taken completely out of context (hi, jessica knows!), is that I think everyone has proven that it needs to be done. If it didn’t, then no one would get their CNET panties in a bunch.

To prove my point, today a very sad thing happened in my online life. A good friend, Cat from 3kidsandus, quit blogging. She quit blogging because it was too much. Her site now says:

After a lengthy discussion with my husband we’ve (or I should say I) realized that I’m not super-mom. I can’t do it all. I can’t raise our children properly, keep a nice house, have food on the table and the laundry done, I can’t be his companion, I can’t entertain or write daily, I can’t keep up with writing reviews to my standards (which are impossibly high) or keep up with the emails…I just can’t. It’s all become this heavy burden that makes me stare with disgust at the computer each morning when I wake up, pass it by each minute seeing that little “new email” icon beckoning me…it’s become a negative aspect of my life that is draining me physically and emotionally.”

This is someone I have known for a year, that has helped countless women online, and is truly an unselfish and wonderful mother. As much as it pains me,  I applaud her for taking back her life.

I only wish she had tried taking her blog back first.

Truthfully, I am waiting for the shit storm of social media suicide to hit. Meaning that women are so incredibly stressed with caring for their families, their friendships, and now their online reputations, blogs, companies and obligations, that they are at the edge, the brink, of a real disaster.

How many times have you turned away from your husband or your child because you had “one more thing to do” online?

A break, a PR Blackout if you will, may show some mom, even just one, that she can live without the false sense of fake visitors entering her contests. That her turning down a PR release or a product wont in fact put her at the bottom of a bloggy blackball list for the future and her online life wont suffer if she doesn’t fall to her knees every time she receives a request.

By taking out the tirade of hundreds of  products from our daily blog lives, we will be actually raising the bar for our content, introducing our blogs to the real us, and ultimately providing a more organic, true platform for all media.  We become more real, our audience becomes more trusting, and the the advertising of these products for those that accept them produce more results for the companies overall.

One of the largest complaints media has about mom bloggers is its sugar coating, candy sweet positive reviews with sketchy ethics. This has zero to do with ethics, but more so to do with getting back to the basics. Do you care how I feel about this sling if you don’t know my child? The chances are no. Maybe the ethics are in not accepting all products that cross your path.

No matter, its a positive thing for PR to see less and less products on mom blogs. That way when they are accepted, they are true, they are relevant, and they are just the right balance of advertising and reality.  Mom Blogs were so valuable to PR based on the content, based on the closeness a writer has with its visitors. Now I can barely blog hop without every other post being related to a product. Heck, I can barely blog hop because of my obligations to these product reps! Its disheartening to see all the obligation across the net amongst everyone. We are losing A-List talent and good people like Cat every day to this.

It needs to stop.

My point is to take blogs to the NEXT level. To provide what we as blog writers and what we as blog visitors really crave: each other.

Now go dry your eyes with your boogie wipes and jump on the bandwagon. The IRS and FTC will be coming soon to a mom blog near you, so there is never a better time to be part of the challenge.

The real question is, are you strong enough to take the step?

~Trisha

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