Dooce as the Blogging Model

Monday, Dooce announced what we all should have seen coming: “The new dooce® community!” I read the post on my lunch break, clicked through a few of the brand new community pages, and signed up.

It’s fantastic. It’s basically like a better Yahoo! Answers with added social networking features and the assurance that the people interacting with you probably aren’t crazy because they’re Dooce fans.

In the year or so that I’ve followed Dooce’s website, I’ve been pretty fascinated with it (see old post, “Modern Rules of Blogging”). To me, it seems to be THE great blogging success story (The same blog that got her fired from her job years later supports her family? Come on, that’s awesome.). Not to mention, arguably, THE blogging business model. She writes about what she cares about, writes well, her content appeals to a wide audience, and now she’s added this new feature to give fans another reason to visit and stay on her site. I mean, she’s got the following. She should capitalize on it while further adding value to her site. The fact is Dooce.com has tons of ads and money-making devices all over the place, but they don’t distract from the content. And in a way, when I click through and see a bunch of ads, it makes me happy to know I’m helping with the ad revenue because the site is great and should be rewarded. Maybe that’s the sign of a truly successful blog.