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Birth of blogs for parents; Sites replace backyard chats.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Karen Goldberg Goff, THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Cecily Kellogg was carrying twin boys last fall when she became very ill, eventually losing both babies. Concerned people checked on her and spread the word of her condition, and she received hundreds of supportive e-mails.

Most of the sentiments came from people Ms. Kellogg had never met in person, but who felt as if they knew her as they checked in with her almost daily on her Web log (blog), called ... And I Wasted All That Birth Control (http://zia.blogs.com/wastedbirthcontrol/), or read about the tragedy when others in the blogging community wrote about it.

"When it happened, I was getting about 3,000 to 5,000 hits (people accessing the log) a day on my blog," says Ms. Kellogg, 37, of Philadelphia. "I was really touched by that."

It was the latest in a chain of events that made Ms. Kellogg's story compelling reading. A former substance abuser, she often writes about her past, her tattoos, her struggle with weight loss, her husband (who now has his own blog), politics and her hope to become a parent.

Blogging - already a force in media and politics - has found a solid place in the parenting community. Parents (and would-be parents) have yakked for years - over the back fence, at the neighborhood coffee shop, at the corner playground. Society is moving at such a fast pace, parents sometimes don't even know their neighbors' names, let alone their...