A little over a year ago I was holed up in a barn in France, laying the blueprint for what would become the How to Live project. When necessary I would hop over the road to what was a temporary yoga retreat – with wireless internet capability – and (whilst averting my gaze from the guru’s oft-brandished ballsack) shoot off emails to friends who were helping me with the logistics of creating this online forum, and our first event – to be held at Paradise Row - at which Simon Critchley eventually gave us a secular sermon on the theme of how to live. This year has more than fulfilled my heart-burstingly high expectations of the project: we’ve not only been the privileged online hosts to works by a talented array of artists and writers, but we’ve also been lucky enough to participate physically in events such as the How the Light Gets In festival at Hay-on-Wye. And we had 30 haikus for 30-yr olds!

The seeds of inspiration for this online space were sown in 2005, when I came across a BBC news item profiling stars of the ‘blogosphere’ and was directed to dooce.com. If you’re reading this, then you’re more than likely well aware of the amazing community that has developed around various American ‘mommy blogs’. Dooce, a.k.a. Heather B. Armstrong, is the original mommyblogger, and was recently ranked number 26 in Forbes’s list of The Most Influential Women in Media (Oprah being number 1, of course). dooce.com gained notoriety in 2001 when Armstrong was fired from her job for writing disparagingly about her workplace and colleagues. In Armstrong’s own words, her blog has traced a life ‘from a time when I was single and making a lot of money as a web designer in Los Angeles, to when I was dating the man who would become my husband, to when I lost my job and lived life as an unemployed drunk, to when I married my husband and moved to Utah, to when I became pregnant, to when I threw up and became unbearably swollen during the pregnancy, to the birth, to the aftermath, to the postpartum depression that landed me in a mental hospital. I’m better now.’

It would be an understatement, perhaps, to say that dooce.com - with its tales of the trials and tribulations of spawning - has spawned its own cottage industry, when ‘empire’ might better describe Armstrong Media LLC, Blurbodoocery, Inc., and the New York Times bestseller It Sucked and then I Cried published earlier this year by an imprint of Simon & Schuster in the US. The Forbes list was selected according to various criteria, taking into account influence via ‘social media outreach’ - something dooce.com achieves not only through 300,000+ unique visits per day, but also through Armstrong’s 1,226,967 followers on Twitter.

1,226,967. 1,226,967?

That’s a figure as staggering and mind-boggling as the 250,000% by which David Eagleman’s collection of short stories Sum (published by Canongate in the UK) shot up The Bookseller’s ‘movers and shakers’ list after it was endorsed by Stephen Fry, and his paltry 750,000 or so Twitterati.

It’s somewhat unsurprising then, that, since 2005, dooce.com has secured advertising from, amongst others, McDonald’s, Weight Watchers and Disney, which, all told, it is estimated, could bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Indeed, Forbes has reported that the Federal Trade Commission has been drawn to investigate and ‘crack down’ on bloggers who may be suspected of being less than up-front about ‘product placement’ deals (something Dooce categorically denies). The Dooce empire now financially supports the Armstrong family, including (and with the key assistance of) husband Jon - and Chuck the dog.

Before the days of McDonald’s and the Federal Trade Commission, I got addicted to Dooce, not simply because a daily dose was a tonic (who doesn’t need to start their day hearing about the consistency of another person’s stool?), but because the site suggested online possibilities that made my imagination catch fire (if not cannily enough to consider those 1,226,967 followers and the potential advertising revenue they represent). I was already tapping away online, corresponding with other fictional online characters such as The Rabbit who, if you ask me, may be involved with this lot who created this thing and base their agency of ‘adventure and play’ on principles of ‘loveliness and reciprocity’.

The internet can be a lovely place to be, and for some of Dooce’s many followers it offers a space for thinking about and laughing through some of the more difficult aspects of being a parent – particularly for those mothers who have suffered from or are actively struggling with ante- or postnatal depression. Shahidha Bari and I describe How to Live as providing philosophical resources for those interested in asking ‘vital questions’ about everyday life, and there have been many times since last August when we have been made acutely aware of the need to carve a space for the expression of solidarity with those whose lives have been rendered unliveable, and for robust counters to the thinking of this country’s re-emergent conservatism - in the face of which questions of motherhood, love and sex have never seemed so vital, and in need of the vitality of thinking we have been fortunate enough to host.

Armstrong has remarked that if she doesn’t post anything on dooce.com ‘for two days in a row, people write to ask if I’m dead.’ Her life has become a story, and yet her success now seems to place this story at a crossroads no doubt familiar to all celebrities of the ‘reality’ genre. For every Dooce-lover, there appears to be a rabid horde of Dooce-dissers – disgusted with the life that dooce.com enables Armstrong and family to live. As one of dooce.com’s readers has asked: how does something as wonderful as the internet inspire so much hate? Armstrong may be ‘better now’, recently acknowledging that she’s in danger of sounding like a ‘droning mommyblogger’, but, she writes, ‘I also hope that [...], from the perspective of someone who has lived through the blinding demons of sadness and hopelessness, [I] might give someone out there a glimpse of what [motherhood] can be, and maybe they’ll go for it.’ Is this the happy ending dooce.com should stick with? A temporary riposte Armstrong offers to the haters is this ironic venture, fascinating for the sheer insanity of its unwitting contributors. Let’s hope, however, that the internet, as well as being a home for irony and irreverence, continues to inspire and support, to be a place of ‘loveliness and reciprocity’.

Vive l’internet.

Coney’s A Small Town Anywhere will run at BAC from 15th October to 7th November 2009.