We were thrilled to have two great guests up to our swank Upper West Side studio recently for an engaging session about a new website, Launching Mom, designed to help moms who are also entrepreneurs connect and share resources.

Those two guests were Heather Reinhard (@ThetaMom) and Corine Ingrassia (@ComplicatedMama) who are also bloggers, with the sites Theta Mom and Complicated Mama, respectively.

With so many women-owned businesses starting up (especially online) and looking for a community and resources, Corine and Heather want Launching Mom to be their go-to place. They joined the Blogging Angels to talk about collaborating, grass roots promotion, and balance.

This week’s links

Heather and Corine built their site on the Ning platform, which is easy to maintain, and scalable. Mom Bloggers Club is also built on Ning.

Heather is a brand ambassador for MomAgenda.com.

Trumpeting Media and Splash Creative are examples of partnerships with more than two partners.

Qwips.com started out as a husband-and-wife team, but investors don’t like married couples.

Nancy cites Silicon Valley Moms as a good reason to make sure you have a partnership agreement in place just in case problems arise.

Between the offensive ads and the elephant kerfuffle, GoDaddy.com is a very divisive company in the mom blogging community. Making a rock video out of an elephant hunting trip didn’t help.

Liz Gumbinner made very good points after the Super Bowl as to why David Beckham in his underwear is OK but the GoDaddy.com girls are not.

Kim Moldofsky’s (Mom Impact) presentation at Blissdom (you can see the slideshow here) about what bloggers make was anonymous, but Cecily K’s (Upper Case Woman) post for MomCrunch was not.

Amy gave her Golden Halo to Houzz.com, which is basically home design porn. Many thanks to Jill Asher for telling her about it.

Rebecca gave her Golden Halo to the new weekly podcast on Slate about grammar, Lexicon Valley.

Corine gave hers to all of the bloggers who showed support for Susan Niebur and her family in the time leading up to Susan’s death, and Audrey McClelland while her husband Matt was in the hospital.

Nancy gave hers to a new anonymous blog, Snaps to my Wild Hair, which she thinks is written by her friend Alice, but doesn’t know for sure.

And Heather gave a bonus halo to KidzVuz.com, since co-owners Nancy and Rebecca are the very definition of Launching Moms.

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

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We’d love for you to weigh in! Leave a comment, we’ll talk back.

Plagiarism. It happened again, in a high-profile way, in the mom blog space. A well-known blogger, Amalah (and we apologize if we pronounced your blog’s name wrong, repeatedly), detailed in a post how her words were stolen. The woman who stole them seems to be at the center of several dramas, but this is the latest and, we think, it may just be the end of brands wanting to work with her.

This week’s links

“The Plagiarist’s Tale” in The New Yorker.

The plagiarized article in question was published this week on Babble’s Being Pregnant blog.

According to one blogger, Kristin Ruiz had a history of questionable behavior regarding other people’s content.

Cecily K  and Lisa Belkin both use other people’s words in ways that don’t break any ethical rules, and start interesting discussions.

Carol Cain once had her blog posts stolen and passed off as someone else’s.

Jayson Blair is famous for posting articles from places he’d never been to.

Liz Gumbinner published a great post a while back, The Blogger’s Ten Commandments of Don’t Steal Our Shit

Angel Amy wrote about the Chrysler Contest Fail, which coincidentally also involved Kristina Ruiz.

BlogHer is a good example of a site that runs popularity contests the right way – you have to register, and you can vote only once.

Nancy gave a rare (but deserved) self-halo to a picture that her mother-in-law sent her recently.

Amy gave her halo to Stephanie Schwab for her post on Social Media Explorer, The Decline of Blogs (and How PR can help avoid it)

Last, Angel Amy said that Kristin Ruiz had originally published the post in question on her own blog, but it was actually posted on AlphaMom.com. Amy regrets the error, and the other Angels managed to talk her back down from the ledge of Nancy’s apartment.

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

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Recently Cecily K. posted a very interesting slideshow on Babble’s MomCrunch laying out how much 25 bloggers charge for sponsored posts. She included a formula for how to get to a starting point for how much to charge if you have no idea. The blogger numbers and the formula started a fantastic discussion, both on Twitter and in the post’s comments, and we used the post as a jumping off point for our own discussion on what sponsored posts are worth, when we work for free, when we work for products and trips and access, and when we flat-out think companies are trying to take advantage of us.

This is the closest that a couple of us have gotten to yelling at each other across the table. Money does that.

Whether you agree or disagree with what Cecily posted, it’s a fascinating subject, and I think we could have talked about it for hours – not just the numbers, but whether or not bloggers should be giving up this info publicly. Angel Amy was one of the bloggers who participated in the survey, and she thinks it’s important to get those numbers out there, to help other bloggers in their negotiations. What do you think? Is it just tacky, or is it time to lay it all out there and help each other make more money?

This week’s links

Jessica Gottlieb listed the highest sponsored post rate in the survey, at $1,000.

Kred.ly is a new-ish site that is giving Klout a run for its money in gauging twitter influence.

The post we discussed originated with another post of Cecily’s, Mommy Bloggers for sale: $7!

We’ve all done sponsored posts through the Clever Girls Collective.

Amy, Rebecca, and Julia Beck attended a fabulous, delicious party hosted by Jennifer Perillo. Thanks, Jennifer!

Amy gave her golden halo to an article in Digiday about why publishers are betting on sponsored posts.

Heidi gave a golden halo to all of the mom bloggers who’ve had babies lately, who have been posting fabulous pictures of their adorable little babies, including Jessica Shyba and Jen Rabulan-Bertram.

Nancy gave halos to Family Travel Forum, Traveling Mom, Norwegian Cruise Line, and Omni Hotels for sponsoring and/or running the recent Family Travel Conference.

Rebecca gave a halo to all of the Social Media Women out there who took down the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and to Joanne Bamberger for her excellent new website, The Broad Side.

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

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We are LIVE from Caesar’s Palace!

L-R: Heidi, Beth, Rebecca, Amy, Nancy

No, really, we recorded this episode in the swankiest hotel suite I’ve ever seen. We all attended a great dinner hosted by Sony and Techlicious at a huge suite at Caesar’s (THREE bathrooms!), and since Angel Heidi works for Techlicious they let us stay in the suite afterwards and record.

We were thrilled that Beth Blecherman could stay with us, since we’ve been trying to get her on the show for a while – not easy since we usually record 3,000 miles away from where she lives.

In a way, Beth is one of the Godmothers of The Blogging Angels, because she was a co-founder of the Silicon Valley Moms, which spun off the NYC Moms, which is how we all met in the first place. She’s also the founder and CTM (Chief Technology Mom) of Techmamas, a fantastic site that, according to its tag line, curates the best of tech and social media for families. It’s a great resource.

So, the five of us discussed the most interesting things we saw at CES, the trends we spotted, and the future of mom bloggers at CES.

And hookers. We can’t come to Vegas and not talk about hookers.

This Week’s Links

The Haier transparent TV has no consumer use that I can think of (it’s probably for store displays), but it’s really, really cool.

The WowWee AppGear airplane, which attaches to an iPhone, is just the tip of the augmented reality iceberg.

Heidi’s son has an AppBlaster, which is definitely less weird than Amy’s son shooting at his family’s floating heads on his Nintendo 3Ds.

Amy stopped by the Art Pro Nail Printer and had the Blogging Angels logo printed on her nail.

The Rose Gold ZENBOOK Ultrabook from Asus is gorgeous, as is the HP Spectre slimbook with Gorilla Glass.

The charity website Whatever It Takes is definitely worth a look.

Amy loves that the Steadicam Smoothee is priced for amateur filmmakers.

The new Smart TV from Lenovo runs on the Android operating system.

Sesame Street Kinect will bring interactive TV to a whole new level.

And last, a shout-out to Grace Duffy – we love you right back!

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

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Looking back on 2011 a lot happened. So much it’s hard to believe that it all happened in just one year! But it did, and we’re giving you an entire Halos and Horns episode – what we loved and hated last year working with brands and navigating the mom blogging universe.

And yes, the Blogging Angels’ furry mascot, Bentley, was quite vocal during the first part of this episode. We think he’s upset that he doesn’t have his own mic.

This week’s links

Rebecca attended the Mom Congress conference in Washington D.C. as the representative from New York State.

Nancy loved an Intel event at held Olives (we all love Intel – even Amy is happy to get off of her couch for them).

Heidi loved the Skylanders launch event, which included pjs for the kids!

Ford gave bloggers time with Bill Ford Jr., which Heidi thought was special.

Jen Wagner’s event for Popcap Games, at EN Japanese Brasserie, was a favorite for Rebecca.

Corrine Ingrassia got a shout-out from Nancy for the KidzVuz event at BlogHer.

Gay NYC Dad got a shoutout from Rebecca for…coupons?

Nicole Feliciano is an example of a blogger whose kids are no longer in diapers who still writes about baby products, as opposed to us Angels. Target your pitches well!

Ford, Playstation and Microsoft got special mentions from Heidi.

Jennifer Perillo is a good example of how the “online” and “in real life” friendships have blurred this year, and we think that’s a move in the right direction.

We hope you had a great year! You’ll be hearing from us next from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where we’ll be talking about the hottest, weirdest, and most interesting new tech products that may be coming to stores and websites near you.

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

To download this episode to your computer directly: right click here, then click “save link as”

We’d love for you to weigh in! Leave a comment, we’ll talk back.

If you have a blog you know how difficult it can be to coordinate everything – what will run when, which events you’ll go to, and how you’ll get everything done in a way that looks polished and together. Multiply that by dozens of writers, and you’ve got a site like TravelingMom.com.

Traveling Mom founder Kim Orlando sat down with us to talk about managing a large website, weekly twitter parties (Mondays at 9pm., #TMOM), twitter vs. Facebook, why travel writing is the best job she can imagine for herself, and much more.

This week’s links

Kim uses Hashtracking.com to gauge the effectiveness of her twitter parties. Heidi also mentioned TweetReach.

You never know who will find your URL if you get it out there on a t-shirt, like perhaps a VP from Spa Finder.

Amy’s been losing weight on Slim-Fast, despite baking more than ever (because she enjoys torturing herself).

Kim gave two golden Halos. The first went to SouthWest Airlines and Windows for their free airport holiday photos. The second went to City Buzz, for including Traveling Mom in their segment that runs continuously on hotel room TVs.

Heidi gave a Halo to Angel Amy for organizing a campaign with One.org called 12 Days of Change. She also gave a halo to Penelope Trunk’s post on TechCrunch titled “Stop telling women to do startups.”

Amy gave her Halo to Gail Dosik, of One Tough Cookie, who has a fantastic site about cookies and cakes and who makes the most beautiful edible creations. And is just a nice, generous person to boot.

Rebecca gave hers to GothamGal Joanne Wilson for her post about why she supports women-owned start-ups.

Nancy gave a Horn to an article in Slate, titled “Don’t support your local book seller.” She also gave a Halo to Jeff Bullas, for his post “20 Stunning Social Media Statistics.”

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

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We’d love for you to weigh in! Leave a comment, we’ll talk back.

It’s been a while since we last put up a podcast, but we hope it’ll be worth the wait.  Because today we are putting up a conversation with Jeff Steir, the founder and creator of Qwips.com, a new Social Voice Platform.

What’s a social voice platform?  Glad you asked.

With Qwips, you can add up to 30 seconds of audio to a Facebook photo, a tweet,  a blog post – even a comment. (Amy wants to just say “Duh-oy!” and thinks it will be much easier with her voice than trying to spell it. Just look at how I spelled it. She’s right.) Turns out, there are audio emoticons on Qwips already. (We suggested the teenager exasperated snort).  Jeff tells us that our social media conversations are really stories.  And how do we tell stories?  With our voices.

Qwips is social media for your voice.

Of course we Blogging Angels believe in the power of talk…it’s what we do! So we love the idea of Qwips, and we think you will too.

Here are this week’s links:

There’s Qwips.com, available on itunes and online.

Jeff told us that 6 billion photos are posted to Facebook each month. Yikes.

Amy tells us that she thinks the best thing about Qwips will be the ability to convey sarcasm.  She’s been lobbying for a font called Sarcastica.  But I bet she didn’t know there is an official Sarcastic Font: Sartalics. Seriously. Really. I’m not being sarcastic.

Rebecca talks about the memory site Proust.com, which Nancy was all impressed with because she thought it was going to be a hoity-toity literary reference and have something to do with Madeleines. Ah well.  At least she knew what the reference might have been.

This week’s Halos and Horns went to:

Nancy gave Horns to paper.li for the endless onslaught of faux newsletters in her Twitter Stream.  Rebecca defended the paper.li folks, saying it was just misused, but not all bad. Whatevs.

Too bad Nancy didn’t yet know about Proxlet.  Amy gave a big halo and little horns to them.  Proxlet helps you keep your twitter stream free of whatever it is you don’t want to see.  Whether it be Tweets from a particular person, with a particular hashtag or from (for Amy) Triberr or (for Nancy – well, see above). The little horn they got was for also blocking DMs.  Bummer.

Rebecca gave her Halo to an article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine about how Facebook is trying to change COPPA laws (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) and get children under 13 on its site. Hmmm.

Our guest Jeff Steir gave his halo to Pepsi, for having the effervescence to sponsor the social/TV component of The X Factor, and taking the lead in the putting the big bucks into the social space.

Heidi, sadly, had NY/NJ Transit issues and didn’t make it on the podcast that day…so you can guess who gets her horns!

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Remember before you were a parent?  You’d see some mother in an airport giving her kid a lollipop at 8:00am, and think “I would never give my toddler a lollipop for breakfast!” Or you’d hear some kid whining at the supermarket about how he just had to have the junkiest junk food in junkfood history, and think, as the mother threw said junk food into the cart in exasperation, “I’d never give in to a whiny kid like that!”

And then you had a kid.

And then, as you pacified your kid on that plane ride with a mouthful of candy, and served up your  second meal of pre-packaged who-knows-what in a week, you stopped being so judgey.  Right? Right? Well, mostly right.  We all still judge sometimes.

Well Redbook Magazine knows all about it.  And that’s what they’ve decided that November 30th is No Judgement Day. For every mother who is doing the best she can (and yes, that’s all of us), they’re starting a movement to banish all mom-on-mom criticism and get women to start supporting each other.

You can join the conversation by tweeting @RedbookMag  and @bloggingangels your #dontjudgemebecause moment.

For me, it’s #dontjudgemebecause I dread soccer games more than visits to the dentist.

Then, you can join The Blogging Angels and Redbook for a Twitter Party this Wednesday, November 30th at 1pm eastern, to share what makes you feel judged, what you’re not going to be ashamed of any longer (parenting wise, that is), and feel the love of other non-judgey moms in cyberspace.  You can even add the No Judgement Twibbon (like a ribbon for your Twitter Avatar) showing your own non-judgey support of the cause!

And there will be a Facebook Giveaway from Redbook!

See you at the Twitter Party Wednesday at 1pm est/10 pst — use hashtag #DontJudgeMeBecause

The Blogging Angels have been trying for a while to coordinate schedules with Jennifer Perillo, a very in-demand food writer and blogger, and the stars finally aligned. Unfortunately, they aligned less than two months after Jennifer lost her husband, Michael Perillo, very suddenly.

Jennifer’s posts about food have always been very personal. She never just puts up a recipe. There’s always a story that goes along with it, often related to family, especially her daughters or her beloved Mikey. Her blog has taken an even more personal turn lately: food writing has taken a little bit of a back seat as she writes about her late husband and her new normal in a way that is both raw and beautiful. But she’s been getting back into writing about food slowly, and her posts have been more eloquent than ever.

We sat down with Jennifer over some banana bread that Nancy made for us. Please join us as we talk about writing, grieving, friendship, and – of course – food.

This week’s links:

Amy uses Duncan Hines Premium Brownie Mix to make her brownies, and Jennifer loves them. There, the dirty secret is out.

Jennifer’s banana bread recipe sounds absolutely scrumptious!

Jennifer’s favorite butter is Kerrygold, but recommends Land O Lakes for us regular people who don’t have access.

Want to churn your own butter? Both Lefferts Historic House and Queens County Farm will let you.

Jennifer wouldn’t have met Gluten Free Girl, the White on Rice Couple, or Bowl Licker if not for the food blogging community.

Jennie’s “A Pie for Mikey” tribute to her late husband went viral, and thousands of people made this pie shortly after her husband’s death.

Life is short. Use the damn butter.

Nancy gave her Golden Halo to The Duchess of Fork, who posted a recipe from Jenny of Picky Palate for Oreo Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies. And no, you can’t substitute Trader Joe’s Jo-Jos or Newman-O’s. They have to be Oreos, because Oreos are the best.

Amy gave her halo to Danielle Wiley and her post on Babble’s MomCrunch about how to figure out rates for sponsored posts.

Jennifer gave her Golden Halo to Erica from Ivory Hut, Maggie from Three Many Cooks and Aimee from Simple Bites and under the high chair, who started Bloggers without Borders. Their first campaign was a college fund for Jennifer’s daughters.

And Rebecca gave her halo to Savvy Blogging for a post about high level planning and low level planning for your blog.

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

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We’d love for you to weigh in! Leave a comment, we’ll talk back.

So last month the Blogging Angels attended the BlogHer conference in San Diego, and we threw our first event! And despite the fact that the planning practically caused Amy to break out in hives, it went really well.

How do we know that it went well? Because we sent out a survey asking our attendees how it went, and we got some really valuable feedback. We went through the results during the podcast, as well as discussed what it’s like to plan an event. Listen in!

This week’s links:

Survey Monkey is free to use (although you get more functionality if you upgrade to a paid plan).

Perrin Kaplan and Zebra Partners were amazing to work with!

Our event was at the beautiful Suite & Tender in San Diego.

Striiv was one of our event’s sponsors, and their awesome product is coming out very soon! Reserve yours!

Qualcomm provided us with some fantastic phones to give away at our event, all running their Snapdragon processors.

Kidzania is sending one of our attendees, Jennifer Desrochers, on a trip for four to one of their amazing parks!

Blissdom is coming up again, and not all of the Angels can make it this year.

Elena Soninno (@CiaoMom) was one of the people who stood up at our event and presented her elevator pitch – and she did a great job!

Finslippy: probably not suffering any for not having the word “mom” in her blog name.

Nancy gave her Golden Halo to @DebontheRocks, for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Social Media Status Updates. Hilarious.

Rebecca gave a halo AND a horn to Eventbrite, because while they’re very useful, they make things very difficult when more than one person needs to access the administrative info for an event. Sorry, Corrine!

Amy gave her halo to a great post on her friend @Chilihead’s site, Blogging Basics 101, about how to keep an editorial calendar for your blog.

And last, we missed you Heidi!

***We’ll be posting the info we mentioned from our BlogHer event as soon as we can, please check back!***

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The Blogging Angels had the pleasure of sitting down recently with the wonderful Lisa Belkin. Well, three of the Angels anyway – Angel Heidi was off doing something fabulous and couldn’t make it back in time. She was sorely missed!

If you’re not familiar with Lisa Belkin, she writes the Motherlode blog for the New York Times. Insightful, curious, and always on top of trends and hot topics in the parenting community, her column deals with the specifics of parenthood. From gender issues to sick children to kids leaving for college, her column has seemingly covered everything, and yet she finds fascinating new topics to post about multiple times each week, and is still going strong after two-and-a-half years.

Listen in as we talk with Lisa about writing in the digital age, work-life balance, men doing housework, why mom bloggers are not always taken seriously as business people, and much more.

This week’s links

Lisa gave Angel Amy’s career an early boost, linking to her columns about paying her children to be good, and lying.

Don’t know who or what Walternate is? You must not be a Fringe fan!

When the New York Times writes about women bloggers making money, the articles are published in the magazine or the Fashion & Style section.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ time use survey.

The New Male Mystique,  by Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute

Susannah Breslin and Why Women Shouldn’t Go To Tech Conferences

Huge shoutout from Rebecca to Corine Ingrassia

Nancy gave her Golden Halo to Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan

Lisa gave her Golden Halo to her latest Motherlode Book Club selection, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet by Melissa Fay Greene

And Amy loves the new hair products coming soon from her hairstylist, Sarah Potempa

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

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…And you wind up with a kick-ass podcast episode about running a collective, working with brands in a mutually-beneficial way, and (most importantly), getting paid for your work. Because as Cat Lincoln put it in the podcast, “Nothing says ‘I love your work’ like money.”

The Blogging Angels were thrilled to have two fantastic co-founders of the The Clever Girls Collective as guests for this podcast, recorded at BlogHer 11 in San Diego: Sheila Dowd (left; @xiaolinmama) and Cat Lincoln (right; @DearBadKitty). The vetted group of bloggers who make up the Clever Girls Network was conceived as the Clever 100, then quickly became the Clever 1,000, and now has over 3,500 members – and the company turns a profit. No small feat in two years. So listen in as we discuss how this all came about, and where it might lead.

This week’s links:

The Clever Girls have run four or five thousand contracts through electronic signature company Echosign – check it out.

Nancy recently participated in a Clever Girls sponsored post project (sponsored by Bing) about how social media has changed her life.

If you love the Clever Girls’ newsletter, thank Kristy Sammis! (@KristySF)

The other Clever Girls co-founder, Stefania Butler, always knows the next big thing. She’s a social media psychic. (@citymama)

Cat’s advice for starting a business? Get a really kick-ass lawyer (theirs is Deb Ludwig).

Nancy had high praise for the open mic night at BlogHer, especially the reading by Erin Kotecki Vest (@QueenofSpain).

As always, Chris Brogan is hurting for page views, so we’re giving him some link love.

Nancy’s Golden Halo went to the women behind the BlogHer open mic event, the Listen To Your Mother Show.

In a fit of shameless brown-nosing, Amy gave her Golden Halo to the Clever Girls’ “Ladies who Tech” brunch at BlogHer.

Heidi gave her Golden Halo to Kiyonna, makers of beautiful clothing for women size ten and up, which gave Heidi a gorgeous  red dress during her Momtrends make-over.

Rebecca gave hers to the collective feeling of being at BlogHer with all of these other amazing women.

Sheila gave a Golden Halo to the women who run BlogHer, Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort, and Jory Des Jardins. She also gave one to the ladies who came to BlogHer who weren’t sponsored.

Cat gave a Golden Halo to the Clever Network, and also to all of the first-time conference goers.

And last, Sheila gave props to Sarah (@GoonSquadSarah) who excited our techie sides and creative sides by producing power strips and nail polish for the Clever Girls to give out at BlogHer.

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

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We’d love for you to weigh in! Leave a comment, we’ll talk back.

Are you heading to BlogHer 2011 in San Diego? Or is it just too freakin’ far? (Yes, we Blogging Angels are east coasters, but we’re all trekking out there – in fact, Angel Heidi is on her way there right now as this is being published!) We’re covering what to bring, what to wear, what to do before you leave, and how to get the most out of BlogHer while you’re there.

Is there a minimum level of presentability for any conference, or is BlogHer a big Anything Goes fest? Will you have Wi-Fi at the hotel and in the conference rooms? (At least one of the Angels will be packing one of these.) Should you bring your laptop? (Angel Amy will make fun of you if you use pencil and paper, but that’s just because she can’t read her own handwriting.)

Want a little man between your beds, for you and your roommate to share? Order this little guy, from Bed Bath & Beyond.

Angel Heidi pulled out a borrowed review unit of the very Blackberry-looking HTC Status during the podcast, which set her and Rebecca off on a long argument about who exactly are millennials (turns out they’re Gen Y – sorry, Rebecca!).

Decide where you want to be at BlogHer before you get there – peruse the BlogHer agenda here.

Angel Rebecca gave horns to a post by Patrick Evans (as shared by Alli Worthington) about marketing (or not) to Gen Y.

For reasons not entirely clear, the Angels were talking about Faith Popcorn and S&H Greenstamps. Sometimes we can’t even follow our own tangents. Plus, we’re old.

Angel Heidi gave her golden halos to apps that help you focus: Rescue Time, Keep Me Out, and Anti-Social.

Angel Amy gave her halo to PacSafe’s laptop bags, which she loves.

Angel Nancy gave hers to a post on MomSpark about how to prepare for BlogHer.

See you in San Diego!

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

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We’d love for you to weigh in! Leave a comment, we’ll talk back.

When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Avatar Kinect  for Xbox during his CES keynote speech earlier this year, we Angels were intrigued. Angel Amy, especially, was excited by the idea of connecting with people on XBox Live without having to get out of her bathrobe – her avatar is always neat and put together. So we were thrilled to be able to stop by Microsoft’s midtown offices a couple weeks ago and give it a whirl, then download it at home and play around with it.

Avatar Kinect let’s you choose from a bunch of different sets, and invite friends in to chat (or just talk to yourself, if that’s your thing). There’s a talk-show set, a beach set, a kids’ playroom set, and a rock star set, to name a few. While “onstage” you can chat, gesture with your arms, raise your eyebrows, move your head, and Kinect will capture it all with your avatar’s movements.

Kinect also takes care of things like camera angle, zooming, and panning, so that you can just talk. Or, if you want, you can add things from the “emote” menu, like applause, balloons, beach balls…the choices change with each “set.”

Entering and exiting the stages happens in different ways, and the Angels had a blast just popping in and out of each one to see how it would happen. We popped in like Bewitched, surfed out on a wave, dove in after a beach ball, and rocketed out into the sky.

Best of all, when you’re done recording you can upload your video to Kinect Share, then download it to your computer and do whatever you want with it. Here’s a little intro video we made. Enjoy!

Avatar Kinect is available in Kinect Fun Labs, for XBox Live Gold Account members.

So some days we want to be helpful, and some days we just want to sit around and bitch. Which is why Amy will be bringing Crazy Bitch Tea to the next recording session – thanks so much to the ladies who make it for recognizing us as their bitchy target demographic and sending us some!.

So what are we harping on this time? From handwriting to people who think technology is the devil’s work to intrusive ads, we getting it off our chests.

We love Mabel’s Labels! Wait, that wasn’t a complaint. But we’re complaining about all the stuff kids have to bring to sleepaway camp.

Heidi mentioned a new site called Altly, which is supposed to be like facebook, but with privacy settings you will actually understand!

Common Sense Media is developing a Digital Driver’s License – we love this idea, and so does Bill Clinton!

Amy doesn’t know what to do with comments. Do you answer every one? Do you end each post asking for them? Do you beg for comments on twitter and facebook? What do you do when comments get nasty? We want to hear how you handle comments on your blog.

And oh, the no-follow attribute! Back in the day (2005) google decided that it was going to get rid of comment spam by making sure that spammers got absolutely no SEO benefit in the google search engine by getting their spammy comments posted on sites and blogs. (Read here for a much better definition of no-follow than Amy was trying to give on the podcast.) However, lots of people think the whole idea sucks.

Heidi, who is pretty much incapable of complaining and being mean (and we love her for it!), gave a golden halo to Little Passports.

And Nancy must have used up all of her bitchiness earlier because she gushed about the ease of starting a blog with Weebly.

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

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We’d love for you to weigh in! Leave a comment, we’ll talk back.

And to all of you who complained about only being able to leave a comment on facebook and not on our website…we listened. You can now leave a comment anywhere, we’re just glad you’re commenting!

l-r: Suzanne Kantra, Rebecca Levey, Nancy Friedman, Amy Oztan. Picture courtesy of Heidi Leder.

Three-fourths of the Blogging Angels had the opportunity during CE Week in NY to speak on a panel about how brands can better work with bloggers. It was moderated by Suzanne Kantra, founder and editor-in-chief of Techlicious.com. (We sorely missed our fourth Angel, Heidi, who was working behind the scenes in her role as Techlicious’  Head of Blogger Community Outreach.)

The panel was amazing, thanks in large part to Suzanne’s preparation. As part of that she had each of us come up with our most important tips to help brands work better with bloggers. While the room was packed, most of you did not have the opportunity to be there, so I’m reprinting our tips here. This is the “tip” of the iceberg, but if you pay attention to these things you will go a long way towards having a mutually-beneficial relationship with bloggers.

Check the blogger out before asking to work with her. Look at her tweet stream (not just the last few, but the last few days or weeks), read her entire “about” page, read any pages she’s posted about PR or advertising. If she’s cared enough to put something in her about page, it means that she expects you to know that about her before you start negotiating. If you don’t have time to do this then you should really be hiring a company that knows bloggers to find them for you.

Figure out if the site is informational or personal. (For example, my youngest is seven and my blog is a personal blog – why would you want me at your baby food event?). Otherwise, you’re wasting the blogger’s time, as well as your own.

Look beyond a blogger’s stats. If you see that a blogger has a lot of Twitter activity, or that she’s on the PTA board at her kids’ school, or that she’s very active within her IRL community — those things count, too. The whole idea of working with mom bloggers is to get a grass-roots buzz going. That means that a blogger’s entire community – both online and off – is part of her ability to get people talking.

Pick bloggers who are genuine fans of your brand and listen to them. They will be your biggest source of ideas and authentic amplification. Build on that instead of trying to get masses of links around the web with no context and no thought.

This is a business relationship. Be upfront about what you expect or want from the blogger and expect to pay accordingly.

A diaper bag is not payment. Sure, sometimes product can count as compensation. But if you’re asking a blogger to attend an event, give you a list of their blogger contacts to invite, tweet about it while they’re there, promote it on their Facebook page, write a post about it, and post to you own website about it as well…well, then a 20% coupon off whatever it is you’re selling isn’t gonna cut it. That’s what coupons.com is for.

Don’t negotiate with what you’re paying other bloggers. If a blogger turns down your offer, whatever it is, don’t come back with “But so-and-so is doing it for XXX.” If the blogger was willing to do it for XXX she would’ve said yes. Telling her what other people are doing it for makes you look unprofessional, and if that other blogger knew you were sharing her rates she’d be pissed that you were giving that info to other bloggers.

Consider the timing. Don’t hold an event you want moms to bring their elementary school kids to at 11am on a Tuesday. Kids are in school. Sounds ridiculous, but it happens all the time. In the same vein, don’t hold a no-kids-allowed event at 4pm on a weekday afternoon. You want Moms because they’re Moms, that usually means they’re “momming” at 4pm on a weekday.

Don’t ever expect a blogger to pay out of her own pocket to promote your product. If you’re holding an event, consider offering a car service or money for a sitter. If you’re inviting a blogger on a trip make sure all of her costs are taken care of. If you’re giving away a product on someone’s blog make sure you take care of sending the product out – do not send it to the blogger and then expect her to go to the post office. This is not “the cost of doing business.” Many bloggers don’t have a steady paycheck – they look at event invitations and opportunities one at a time and consider whether or not the time and money they will cost will be worth it. Consider offering to pay for these expenses before wasting money on more Flip Cameras or pedicures.

Don’t ever tell a mom blogger that being a mom is hardest job in the world. It’s not empathy, it’s a cliché and it’s condescending.

And don’t ever, ever start an email with Dear Mommy Blogger!

The Blogging Angels were thrilled to sit down with Wall Street Journal writer Katie Rosman to discuss the book she wrote after her mother died, her WSJ personal finance column, what she’s reading, and of course, twitter (you can follow her here).

This week’s links

When twittering gets in the way of real life, by Katie Rosman

That person that Katie and her husband had dinner with at SXSW? None other than Brew PR founder @Brooke.

Guy Kawasaki tells people to UFM if they don’t like what he tweets.

Amy does NOT follow LaToya Jackson, Nancy, she follows the wonderful @ToryJohnson, CEO of Women for Hire.

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, on Kindle

From Left to Write discusses Katie’s book

Amy loves gdgt.com.

Mashable’s post about the best tips for using twitter.

PriceGrabber.com has made Heidi’s inbox happier.

The Museum of Me from Intel

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

We’d love for you to weigh in on Katie’s book, people who don’t “get” Twitter, and everything else we discussed. Join the discussion on Facebook.

Burning bridges. Résumés. Newsletter. Money. Twitter parties. Invoicing. It’s a potpourri. We’re answering listener questions and talking about how to keep your name out there.

This week’s links

Nikki, @MommyFactor on twitter, started us off with a couple of great questions about what to do when PR people don’t follow through, and what to do when you’ve shared info with a company that ends up not working with you.

LinkedIn. Are you in?

Angel Heidi had to run early, but gave her golden halo to Sparked.

Mail Chimp and Constant Contact are two companies that can help you with newsletters.

The Angels LOVE Fresh Direct (the three of us who live in NYC are loyal customers). But we did not have a good experience trying to work with them.

Amy Lupold Bair, @ResourcefulMom on twitter: the queen of the twitter parties.

Angel Amy discovered Intuit’s Billing Manager at Blissdom in 2010. [NOTE: Listener Lisa (@NewYorkChica on twitter) let the Angels know that Billing Manager is no longer accepting new sign-ups. Angel Amy checked it out and discovered that the Billing Manager service is being discontinued as of September 2011. After getting up from the fetal position Amy started looking into other free invoicing programs, and settled on testing out the following: Zoho, Billing Boss, Invoice Expert, and Volutive. She will be trying them out and reporting on them in a future podcast.]

Angel Rebecca uses Mint to keep track of her finances.

And a tip from Rebecca: do NOT invoice through PayPal.

Amy is in love with her Cuisinart stand mixer, recommended to her by Jennifer Perillo @JenniferPerillo on twitter).

Wendi Aaron’s post about product placement.

The Kitchen Couple designed Rebecca’s IKEA kitchen, which she loves. And now she’s discovered IKEA Hackers.

Amy posted a couple of amazing videos about people who have transformed teeny tiny apartments into amazing living spaces, and Nancy introduced us to the crocheted apartment (ick).

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

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We’d love for you to weigh in on all of the stuff we talked about today! Join the discussion on Facebook.

The Blogging Angels were very excited to have two guests with us for this podcast, Lorie Boyd and Jon Shalowitz, who came to our “studio” (Nancy’s awesome apartment) to talk about myi, which is a service that customizes the internet, working across all of your internet-enabled devices. And why would we devote an entire episode to this? It wasn’t because they brought us the cutest chocolates ever (those are some of the myi apps in chocolate!):

It’s because the four of us are tech-savvy computer/phone/game console/gadget-laden moms who all have different wants and needs in our homes for how we use the internet. And as much as we would like to pretend that we have all of these devices slaving away exactly as we want them to, in reality it’s often the opposite – sometimes, the devices are running us.

Rebecca, Heidi and Nancy getting a myi demo from Jon & Lorie

So, instead of trying to wrangle all of the different controls on all of our different devices, we’re excited about the prospect of this soon-to-launch service giving us an easy, apps-based way to tackle the issue at the source: with the internet coming into the house. You can check out the myi online magazine, and of course, listen to our podcast to learn all about it!

And a HUGE apology to @NYCPatty – Amy went back to her notes after the podcast and realized that she hadn’t “stumbled” upon her Golden Halo link, it was sent to her by the Blogging Angels fan who writes A Day in My NYC. Thanks Patty!

This week’s links

Angel Rebecca at the Mom Congress in Washington, D.C., and even at the White House!

SocialSklz

Monica Villa, The Online Mom

Katy Widrick’s post about sharing your blogroll

Recchiuti Chocolates

Family Online Safety Institute

WiseStamp

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

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We’d love for you to weigh in on myi and how you wrangle your internet at home! Join the discussion on Facebook.

Ambassador. It’s an important sounding word, and companies want you to think that it’s an honor to be their ambassador. But what exactly does that mean? Do you get special access? Should you be paid? Will your status keep Danny Glover from shooting you at the end of Lethal Weapon 2? (Um, no.)

Getting asked to be an ambassador can be flattering, lucrative, and full of insider experiences that are priceless. Or it can be a big waste of time where the company is basically using you. Go in with your eyes open.

We also talk about how (and when) to ask for money, and what not to do if an ambassadorship goes sour (do as Angel Amy says, not as she does!).

This week’s links

Kids Club Thirteen

Nicole Feliciano’s tweets and blog

Liz Gumbinner’s tweets and blog

Jessica Smith’s post about letting people pick your brain

Kim Moldofsky’s post about working for free

A post on Problogger about why the writer’s mom didn’t make it as a blogger

Via Consumerist, Cloud Girlfriend (which has changed it’s purpose a bit since this podcast was recorded – oh well)

The best Mother’s Day gift ever in the history of the world

Blog World

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We’d love for you to weigh in on ambassadorships! Join the discussion on Facebook.

So, you want to be popular, do you? You can get online awards, make top ten lists, even get paying jobs for being popular. But what happens when you annoy everyone who follows you in your quest to win those popularity contests? Is it worth it? And is begging your followers for votes for days on end any way to prove to a company that you deserve a job?

This week the Blogging Angels discuss all those pleas on twitter, facebook and blogs – “Vote for me, pretty please?” “I hate to bug everyone, but I need your vote!” and how they’ve handled them (or in Angel Amy’s case, completely mishandled them) in the past.

This week’s links:

Meagan Francis, The Happiest Mom

Angels Nancy and Rebecca’s new website, Kidzvuz.com

Rebecca’s article about the underwhelming amount of help she got from people she had helped in the past

No, seriously Vera Sweeney, Nancy IS following you!

@FrenchFoodieMom’s tweet about popularity contests

How to kill your blog with social media

We referenced Scott Stratten again. This is becoming a habit

My Workspace feature on Mom Blog Magazine

Babble.com – they don’t beg for votes

We love ElissaPR!

How to be a social media jerk

Ed Voices’ open letter to parents

Angry Birds

You can listen to the podcast below, or subscribe on iTunes. Don’t forget to give us a great rating!

Conferences, junkets, trade shows…what do they all mean? And when you go to one, which parts do you share with your readers? Is it OK to blog about swag? Tweet about the awesome food you’re being served? The special treatment you’re receiving? What do your hosts expect of you? And what happens when twitter gets jealous and accuses you of bragging?

This week the Blogging Angels tackle this confusing area, using the recent Disney Social Media Moms Celebration as a jumping off point.

This week’s links:

Chris Brogan

Rene Syler

Georgia Stitt and Susan Egan

Mom Central’s list of blogging conferences

Chrysler’s twitter debacle

Let’s Panic About Babies, by Eden Kennedy and Alice Bradley

Catch A Fire

Anna Quindlen & Lisa Belkin’s post on The Motherlode, The Best Part of Parenting

Camels and Chocolate

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Whether you blog to make money, influence people, share your writing, or a combination of all of these, there are some tools you should have in your toolbox to help you make the most of opportunities that come your way. In our latest podcast we talk about the business of blogging: rate cards, press kits, media kits, contracts, headshots, and more.

Should you post your ad rates on your site? What should go into your media kit? Which blog stats should you share with potential advertisers? The Blogging Angels – Nancy, Amy, Rebecca, and Heidi – answer these questions and more. And we bitch a little about Facebook, just because.

This Week’s Links:

It’s A New Day, by Esther Crawford

Google Analytics

How to determine the value of a social media mom, by Holly Pavilka

Reasons to Hate

Microsoft Office Support

Mobile etiquette: is that phrase rapidly becoming an oxymoron? Are the little devices we carry with us everywhere turning us into anti-social jerks? Or are they just amplifying the jerkiness that already existed in some users? We discuss this and much much more on our latest podcast!

Here are some links from this week’s podcast:

Three of the four Angels attended a mobile etiquette event hosted by Intel, during which mobile habits were discussed.

Did you know that you can set your child’s iPod so that it can’t go over a certain volume? Directions are here.

Very exciting: Nancy and Rebecca recently launched KidzVuz, a video review site for kids.

Angel Amy was included in a recent New York Times Magazine article by the fabulous Lisa Belkin, regarding her completely anal retentive disclosure policy.

And now for our Golden Halos:

Angel Rebecca gave horns to an article on BNet.com attacking mom bloggers, specifically mentioning “friend of the podcast” Momtrends. Go read Jennifer James’ response, but don’t give the original article any more traffic!

Angel Amy recently “ran” (jogged, walked and crawled) Disney’s Princess 1/2 Marathon, and was pissed off to read a babble article dissing the tiara and costume aspect of it.

Angel Nancy had a big horn for the government wanting to shut down Planned Parenthood. Boo!

So that’s it for this week! What do you think about giving your kids mobile devices to play with in restaurants? And why is it considered so much worse to sit on a bench in the playground with your BlackBerry than with a newspaper or book? Chime in on Facebook.

Please note: the  Windows phones mentioned during the podcast were given to the Blogging Angels free of charge by Microsoft.

If you’ve got questions, we’ve got answers. And if you do giveaways on your site, you’ve got to listen to this podcast.

We love answering listener questions, since it gives us a chance to act like know-it-alls. So please, keep those questions coming! You can tweet us, @BloggingAngels, or email us, BloggingAngels@gmail.com.

Nancy Horn, of TheProductMama.com, asked a question about what happens when a pr contact leaves a company.

Our second question comes from – we think – @MoreThanMommy: What do you do when a brand switches agencies?

Then, we moved on to a topic that affects a lot of bloggers, and we’re guessing that most bloggers don’t do enough to protect themselves: giveaways. Nancy and Rebecca attended a seminar run by a law firm dealing with giveaways, and shared their knowledge.

Remember the Hannah Montana contest kerfuffle?

And that RIAA thing that I mentioned? It’s this. And it was ridiculous.

Be careful not to act like you’re representing a company if you have nothing to do with that company. We talked about this last week!

And now for this week’s Golden Halos:

@Marinka sent this Amy‘s way a couple weeks ago: Lost in the Chaos wrote about her fifth anniversary of finding out she had cancer. It’s gut-wrenchingly moving.

Heidi gave hers to Stephanie Smirnoff, of deVries PR, for a post on her site PR Mama discussing advertorial vs. edvertorial.

Rebecca gave hers to Unexperienced Mom‘s Blog Conference Newbie site, which has a ton of valuable info about conferences.

And Nancy gave her Golden Halo to Rebecca’s Twelve Week Blog Shape-Up Plan on Mom Blogger’s Club. Go Rebecca!

The Blogging Angels hit the Toy Fair at the Javitz Center in New York, and came away with some good info about business in general – because as much as we like to think of toys as happy products having to do with happy kids, it’s actually a 22 billion dollar a year business. Toy fair is a trade show, similar to CES but with more women (who are wearing more clothing), and happy primary colors.

So what did we talk about this week?

For the second year in a row Amy spoke on a panel at the Engage Expo, about how to engage moms online.

Nancy and Rebecca went to hear Moshi Monsters creator and CEO Michael Acton Smith speak about entering the online kids’ world space, and both proclaimed his speech phenomenal.

We all love Melissa & Doug, although most of our kids are sadly out of that stage.

Rebecca really loved Activision’s Skylanders, Spyro’s Adventure.

Amy was careful to preserve the correct memory of Big Pussy Bonpensiero, making this (hopefully) the first and only blog post about Toy Fair to include the word Pussy.

And of course we had to talk about the whole Toyota debacle. Heidi gave an early Golden Halo to Shelly Kramer’s crack investigative reporting regarding Toyota and how they were included – without their knowledge – in a PR disaster. Some other notable mentions were Liz Gumbinner’s take on the whole thing, and Dear Crissy’s post which got the ball rolling in the first place.

This week’s Golden Halos:

Heidi gave her Golden Halo to the Shelly Kramer piece about the Toyota mess.

Amy gave hers to a Gizmodo post about a prototype doll from Mattel. Creepy squared.

Nancy gave her Golden Halo to Blog Hop, which helps you get traction when you write about certain topics, and share the love for others writing about the same topic.

And Rebecca gave hers to a Kissmetrics post (shared by the good folks at Alltop) about the demographic break down of social media.

With Blissdom behind us, the Blogging Angels are discussing conference take-aways: what do you hope to get out of a conference, and just how does a blogger decide which conferences to go to? Amy got some very solid takeaways from Blissdom and has already started making changes to her blog. But do all conferences provide that kind of concrete, take-action info, and should they? Or is the social aspect just as important?

This week three of the Angels had Golden Halos to give out, and one had Devil Horns:

Amy gave her Golden Halo to Busy Dad Blog’s excellent post about growing up different.

Nancy gave horns (boo!) to auto DMs on twitter.

Rebecca gave her Golden Halo to her favorite dad blog, Blirred Reality.

And Heidi gave her Halo to C. Mom’s post about what it means to have a gifted child.

Here’s what else we talked about this week:

Amy made several changes to her blog because of the SEO workshop at Blissdom (put on by Shelly Kramer, Ang England and Melanie Nelson), but changed one of them back already.

Heidi thought twice about tagging the photo in this post “red dress” since she didn’t want “that” kind of traffic.

Rebecca’s site gets a lot of traffic for a picture tagged “Mona Lisa cat.” Weird.

Nancy gets crazy traffic from pictures of David Hasselhoff and Elmo.

Rebecca has a love/hate relationship with the WordPress Popular Posts plugin.

Rebecca talked about how someone figured out how to get a random story to the top of the New York Times’ most emailed articles list.

Once again, we talk about the usefulness – or not – of the BlogHer conference.

Many people we know are skipping the next BlogHer conference in favor of Mom 2.0 instead.

We discuss how a great list of speakers can convince us to attend a conference, but a speaker we don’t like can be a complete turn-off for the conference as a whole, like with She-Con.

And we were all shocked by the huge range of fees we heard about during previous guest Kim Moldofsky‘s panel about how much bloggers make, based on a survey she did.

This week The Blogging Angels talk about…well, a lot.

We start off talking Blissdom takeaways: what did we learn in Nashville, anyway? And end up talking about this week’s big AOL/Huffington Post takeover and the mounds of cash that must now be piled on top of Arianna Huffington’s desk. In between, we talk hits versus views, versus uniques (hint: nobody who’s anybody uses hits anymore); building a community profile (you’ll have to listen to understand what Heidi means by that), when guest posting for nothing is really worth something, Rebecca’s just about viral post on education and how it got that way (hint: it starts with a T and ends with an R), and we even manage to get a reference or two to Justin Bieber in there.

I told you we talked about a lot.

Here are links to some of the stuff we covered:

Angel Rebecca’s article – reprinted in the Washington Post (Yay Rebecca!).

UnMarketing guru Scott Stratten – and the fact that he left a comment on Nancy’s post.

Cecily K’s blog, and how her… unsavory… language hasn’t stopped her from being a super-powerful blogger.

Compete, Alexa and Google Analytics, and why they do and don’t matter to advertisers and sponsors.

Diane Ravitch, education guru with a BIG twitter reach.

And there’s no link for this one — just had to put it in – my favorite quote from Angel Amy on shameless networking: “If you don’t leverage your real life friends, what do you have them for?”

We also gave out Golden Halos:

Angel Amy gave hers to Should I Work for Free, a website that offers a funny – but surprisingly useful – flowchart to help you determine… well, you can guess that part.

Angel Rebecca gives her Golden Halo to AVC.com, venture capitalist Fred Wilson‘s intelligent, well written blog about… well, just about anything tech that crosses his mind.

Angel Heidi - who may be the only one of us who really does have wings – gave a Golden Halo to CatchaFire.org, a non-profit that asks you to devote time and skill rather than money to help a variety of causes.

Angel Nancy (that’s me!) gave a Golden Halo to 3moms3photos.com, a website that’s exactly what the title says: three moms takin’ photos. Simple, beautiful.

Lastly: we want to hear from you! Come on over to our Facebook page, and join the conversation. Or start one. Or whatever. You comment, we’ll respond. You ask, we’ll answer (as long as it’s not math. I hate math). Come on! We can’t be the only ones with something to say!

The Blogging Angels – or at least three-quarters of us – were in Nashville, TN last week for the Blissdom Conference, an annual gathering of (mostly) women who blog. With incredibly informative sessions, dynamic speakers, and great sponsors, Blissdom is three days of learning, fun, and inspiration.

The road to Blissdom was not easy, however. After an incredibly bump-free trip to Las Vegas for CES, the weather did not cooperate last week, getting Rebecca and Nancy into Nashville two days late. Heidi wasn’t able to make it due to prior commitments, and we missed her so much! We also missed the Yeti Pro omnidirectional microphone we recorded with at CES. At Blissdom, we were huddled around a microphone from my XBox RockBand game.

We were thrilled, however, to have Kim Moldofsky as our very special guest. Kim blogs at Hormone Colored Days (including the hilarious house-hunting video series Property Sluts) and Mom Impact, which specializes in connecting bloggers with brands. She tweets as @KimMoldofsky.

Some of the things we talked about in this episode:

Kim’s prior speaking credits include Blogalicious, Blissdom, and Type A Mom. She also spoke at the Sweets and Snacks Expo in Chicago, and got to hang with Nancy Pelosi at a press conference.

Rebecca wrote a great post about the importance of conferences for women. That post of Rebecca’s definitely influenced Amy’s comment on a post written by DadaRocks.

Mom Impact hosted a Blog World Expo webinar about how to develop a great speaker proposal, and luckily for us it was transcribed!

Kim was sponsored at Blissdom by ConAgra Foods, and Amy was sponsored by Kleenex.

The survey that Kim put on Mom Impact about getting paid is still there – chime in!

Amy was happy to wear an eBay Classifieds t-shirt at BlogHer last summer, and all of the Angels were very enthusiastic about promoting new Windows phones as part of our sponsorship to CES last month.

And if we all agree on one thing, it’s that you should never, ever, tape a sign to your shirt with info about your conference sponsor.

Golden Halos

Amy gave her Golden Halo to the concept of “owning it.” Granted, there’s no website to point to for that concept, so she’s just going to link to Blissdom for really hammering home the point.

Rebecca’s Golden Halo went to Hallmark’s personalized paper plates, with pictures in the middle of the plate uploaded by you.

Nancy’s Golden Halo gets split between Alli Worthington, Barbara Jones, Paula Bruno, and Megan Jordan for creating such an amazing event as Blissdom.

And that’s it for this week! See you next week, when we’re be back in familiar territory – Nancy’s dining room – with our good microphones.

This week we Angels introduce a new feature: listener email.  We’re answering listener questions about Social Media Etiquette in the age of gimme gimme.

First up, we tackle a question from Maria, @pluslily, who wants to know how to follow up with PR companies and develop continuing relationships with them.

Our next two question come from mom-preneur and real life friend to Rebecca, Julie.  She asks about naming names in blogs and about product placement. What should a mom-preneur expect?

After we’ve closed the virtual mail-bag, we’re on to our snarkiest recurring segment: What We’re Harping On.  Heidi lets loose (in the nicest possible way) on drunken bloggers at corporate events. Rebecca talks about invitations to events that aren’t what they seem. Amy, amazingly, has nothing mean to say, and Nancy just agrees with everybody else.

This week’s Golden Halos go to:

Jennifer Perrillo and what Amy calls “The best ever in the history of the world – and I’m not overstating” recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Fauxology – because Heidi, and the rest of us, appreciate her loyal listenership, and envy her design savvy.

The Innovative Educator.  A blog about – wait for it – innovation in education.  Because Rebecca admires her smart ideas on incorporating tech into the classroom.

UrbanQ: An app designed by a woman entrepreneur that recommends restaurants, kid events, shops, shows, you name it, and learns your preferences as it goes.

Here are some links to some of the other things we discuss:

Listener Julie’s business,  Hola Baby, makes adorable onesies which you can check out here.

Nancy gives @NYCPatty a shout out for being such a great fan (and Zumba doer).

For info on building relationships with brands, we recommend listening to Ben The PC Guy and Lisa Worthington from a little ole company called Microsoft.

We talk about our upcoming trip to Blissdom, Amy explains how  her husband became affectionately known as The Ass, Nancy tells us how Harry Connick Jr. is blood-related to her in some weird and distant way, and Heidi has an existential crisis of sorts…is she/was she/will she be at Blissdom?

Amy and Heidi both said that UrbanQ reminded them of Bizzy.

Plus: we reveal THE ONE THING NEVER TO SAY TO A ROOM FULL OF MOM BLOGGERS.

Have a comment?  Question? Rant? Rave?  Leave it below.  We love listener feedback!

The Day 3 podcast from CES saw the complete disintegration of the Blogging Angels’ composure, as well as a link to a porn star. But we also found time to talk about some more great products.

One more thank you to Microsoft Windows for sponsoring the Blogging Angels’ trip to Las Vegas, and for providing us with four HTC HD7 Windows Phone 7 phones to use while here.

Thanks to Blue Microphones for letting us use the not-yet-released Yeti Pro to record our CES podcasts.

A highlight of the Blogging Angels’ time at CES: we were interviewed by the awesome Chris Brogan (@ChrisBrogan).

The Angels with Chris Brogan, our honorary Bosley

And everyone but Amy attended an awesome Ladies Who Tech breakfast hosted by the Clever Girls Collective, which was the brainchild of @tech4moms and techmama, and was sponsored by Swagg. Yes, Amy regrets not going. And don’t worry, Nancy found her gift card!

By the way, @littletechgirl is an overachieving mom of TWO sets of twins. We just thought you should know that.

Amy gushed about the Makerbot. And was confused by the idea of a printer that prints itself.

Rebecca invoked the name of Robin Byrd, which takes a lot of explaining (unless you grew up watching NYC Public Access TV in the 70s and 80s).

Rebecca liked the Samsung Slider Series 7 tablet/laptop, almost as much as Heidi liked miming the motion the keyboard made. Then there was the Samsung 9 Series latops, made of ultra-thin aluminum.

And we talked about the Samsung TV, again. We can’t help it.

Yup, we're still talking about this TV

And we discussed MommyTech again. A lot.

Nancy thought that David Pogue gave some good business advice about real-time  sharing. However, the Angels in attendance wondered why he was giving a keynote at the MommyTech Summit when nothing he said had anything to do with moms. Or tech.  Also, he was sort of funny – but not nearly as funny as he thought he was.  Really.

And that’s it! Thanks for joining us at CES.

The links from our Day 2 at CES podcast include dancing robot mops, a laptop that watches you while you watch it, and the most beautiful TV in the history of TVs. Read on and enjoy!

We had a very special guest with us for this podcast, mom blogger and Microsoft Windows employee Lisa Worthington (@WinMommyLisa).

Nancy was amazed (and a little horrified) by the ArtPro Nail Printer.

We predict this will soon be featured on Jersey Shore

We will forever have the music from this “dancing mops” video in our heads. Thanks, Mint!

Nancy talked about Eye-Fi, which kind-of turns any old digital camera wireless, and about how much she loves sending her pictures from her HTC HD7 phone (given to The Angels by Microsoft to use at CES) to SkyDrive.

The Eye-Fi booth

Lisa and Rebecca talked about some of the great features of Windows Phone 7 phones, including your facebook pictures automatically appearing on your phone and being able to make “tiles” for individual people.

Heidi told us about a Toshiba laptop that uses its webcam to sense where your eyes are looking, so that you can watch 3D without glasses.

Heidi also brought up the 75 inch Samsung TV that we (and everyone else at CES) were drooling over.

It's thin, gorgeous and shiny - it is Vegas, after all!

Amy and Rebecca talked about Neer, which Amy desperately needs on Windows Phone 7.

Amy loved the Etch-A-Sketch iPad covers from Headcase.

We all talked about the unfortunately-named Mommy tech. And Amy hyped her post, Please PR Pros, treat me like a Mom Blogger.

And Lisa talked about how great it was bringing kids from Boys and Girls clubs through CES.

Lisa Worthington leads some kids from Boys and Girls Clubs of America around CES

Thanks again to Blue Microphones for letting us use the not-yet-released Yeti Pro to record our CES podcasts.

And of course, another huge thank you to Microsoft Windows, for sponsoring the Blogging Angels’ trip to Las Vegas, and for providing us with four HTC HD7 Windows Phone 7 phones to use at CES.

Our podcast from Day 1 of CES was chock full of great products and links, and here they are!

Nancy discovered Tech Support for Dummies, and we all immediately wanted to sign our parents up.

Nancy and Amy had to watch Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote address from a Las Vegas hotel bathroom (Heidi actually made it into the room), but you can watch it from the comfort of…someplace other than a bathroom.

Avatar Kinect will allow you to interact with a group of your friends on XBox Live using  your gaming avatar and the Kinect’s incredible ability to track your movements and facial expressions. Coming to Kinect this spring.

Microsoft Surface uses the new PixelSense technology to take touch screens to a whole new level: each pixel acts as a camera, so the screen can “see” exactly what you’re doing!

Acer showed off the Iconia, a dual-touch-screen notebook running Windows 7.

The Angels were all sporting their HTC HD7 phones (compliments of Microsoft Windows), running on the new Windows Phone 7 operating system.

Heidi enjoyed Lenovo’s CES party, where she ran into @JenRab, @MoreThanMommy, the Lenovo LePad (yes, we’re still laughing at the name), and an incredible cake driven in all the way from Baltimore by Charm City Cakes.

Driven from Baltimore to Las Vegas by Charm City Cakes!

Of course we just HAD to mention the adult film expo down the street.

Heidi liked the new Sony Bloggie 3D, which will record and play back in 3D without glasses. Yay for no glasses!

Heidi also reported on a couple bits of Skype news: Skype’s acquisition of Qik, and their group video chat service which, at $8.99 for up to ten people, may make Amy switch over from the more expensive ooVoo.

Nancy was fascinated by the new Microsoft Touch Mouse that uses finger gestures instead of a wheel, which reminded Heidi of Nox Audio’s Admiral Touch noise canceling headphones, which have touchscreen gesture controls.

Rebecca and Nancy stopped by the PrimeSense booth to check out the technology behind Microsoft’s Kinect.

Amy had a Kinect revelation: you can use VideoKinect to talk to other people over Windows Live Messenger.

A huge explosion – either the volcano outside of the Mirage hotel or part of the pirate show at the Treasure Island hotel across the street – interrupted the podcast and sent the Angels into fits of laughter. Only in Vegas could something explode and you’d having trouble figuring out which sidewalk show it was from!

We all talked about the great features on our HTC HD7 phones, including the ability to automatically post pictures to skydrive. And Amy loves how quick the phone can go from asleep and locked to taking a picture, which allowed her to snap this before it pulled away:

Amy wants to know how this works. Are the girls actually IN the truck?

Nancy was fascinated by Splat ElectroClean, which reminded Amy of CyberClean.

Heidi loved the incredibly beautiful (and expensive) jewelry-like bluetooth accessories from Novero.

Thanks so much to Blue Microphones for letting us use the not-yet-released Yeti Pro to record our CES podcasts.

And of course, a huge thank you to Microsoft Windows, for sponsoring the Blogging Angels’ trip to Las Vegas, and for providing us with four HTC HD7 Windows Phone 7 phones to use at CES.

L-R: Nancy, Rebecca, Nicole, Heidi, and Amy

This week the Blogging Angels were joined by our very first mom blogger/entrepreneur guest angel, Nicole Feliciano editor and owner of MomTrends.  We dished on PR and press events for bloggers, debated the role of bloggers vs. journalists, took on the ever complicated subject of compensation and discussed the future of sponsorship and ad models on blogs.   It’s a delicate and important talk you won’t want to miss.  And if there’s one takeaway from this week please let it be that you should NEVER work for a chance to win a giftcard.  NEVER.

This Week’s Golden Halos:

Heidi singled out Melissa Chapman aka @madijack for her insightful and honest article about religion.

Amy threw out some extra pointy Devil horns to the NYC Dept. of Education for trying to shoehorn a charter school into Amy’s kids’ public school.  Forget Waiting For Superman – her school has super parents who aren’t going to take this lying down.

Nancy highlighted Gazelle.com which will take and pay you for your old electronics and recycle them in an environmentally friendly way.

Rebecca wants everyone to read Dan Zarrella’s eye-opening article and analysis on ProBlogger about when the best times and days are to blog, Facebook, tweet.

Nicole gave a sparkly kudos to Clever Girls Collective for valuing bloggers time and work and making brands do the same.  The Angels agree!

Here are links to other things we discuss this week:

Lifetime Fitness worked with Nicole and understood and met her needs in order for her to attend and experience their newest club in Long Island.

360 Public Relations and Devries PR are two firms that Heidi admires for their respectful handling of mombloggers and their acknowledgement that our time is valuable.

Olay worked wonderfully well with Nicole sponsoring a creative and out of the box sponsored campaign.  As did Yoga Stuff Plus.

And a shout out to Norma Rosenfield and her incredibly spot on and well planned Disney events for Disney Consumer Products.

For mom bloggers looking to join a collective like Clever Girls here are some more great organizations that treat bloggers right (and pay them!)

The Motherhood

Role Mommy

Mom Bloggers Club

Babycenter

UPDATE: Looking for the links from this podcast? Look no further than our Day 3 link round-up.

We’re packing up our blistered feet and heading home. But first, one last podcast from CES, with some more cool products, some trend talk, and some favorite Vegas moments.

Thanks again to our fantastic sponsor, Microsoft Windows, and especially Lisa Worthington.  We had an amazing (and exhausting) time here in Las Vegas, got to see lots of cool new tech products, show off our Windows Phone 7 phones, and meet up with lots of great women, and even a few men.   Microsoft gets honorary Angel wings for supporting women bloggers.

A special thank you also to Blue Microphones for letting us record on their brand-new, not-yet-released Yeti Pro mic.  It’s a powerful omni-directional mic that saved us from lugging four separate mics and a giant mixing board across the country.

UPDATE: You can find links to all of the products we talk about on our Day 2 link recap.

Day 2 at CES was a blast. Three of us spent some time hanging out at the Windows table in the Mommy Tech area, and got blasted every ten minutes with the music for the dancing Mint floor cleaners at the next table.

After being taken out to an amazing dinner by Lisa Worthington, our “Sponsor Angel” from Microsoft Windows, we all sat down in Nancy’s hotel room and managed to record a podcast without completely losing it like we had the night before. It helped that no volcanoes went off.

UPDATE: Looking for all of the links we talk about in this podcast? You can find them here.

We came, we saw…we recorded while exhausted and totally punchy.  Here’s The Blogging Angels‘ Day 1 recap of notable things we saw at the Consumer Electronics Show, minus our usual links and other helpful things – we’re just too busy running around the Las Vegas Convention Center!  So we’ll be posting a wrap-up soon with all of the useful stuff we’ve been spoiling you with.  Until then, take a listen.  We saw some seriously cool stuff.

And we would of course like to thank our awesome sponsor, Microsoft, for bringing us here to CES.  If you’re here in Vegas, various Blogging Angels will be volunteering at the Windows kiosk in the North Hall throughout Friday and Saturday, so stop by and say hi!

Are you wondering where your weekly Tuesday dose of Angel podcast went?
Well, worry no more! The Blogging Angels aren’t slacking off — we’re flying off to Las Vegas!

The kind folks at Microsoft Windows 7 are sponsoring all four angels for a trip to the Consumer Electronics Show, otherwise known as CES, the largest tech show on the planet, or the biggest geek-fest of all time. (It’s also known as the trade show held at the same time as the Adult Film Star trade show down the hall. Really. Not kidding.)

So we’re packing up pocket protectors and pasties, and heading to Las Vegas.

But what happens in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas: We’ll be posting and tweeting and blogging and vlogging and all around keeping you up to date on what’s happening at CES, in the Mommy Tech booths, and yes, what’s with those adult film stars. We’ve all got loaner Windows 7 Phones (thanks Windows Phone 7 people!) to make keeping in touch with pictures and tweets even easier.  Plus, we’re even doing a stint as “booth babes,” (minus the revealing outfits) at the Microsoft Windows booth during Mommy Tech on Friday and Saturday. So if you’re at CES, stop by and say hello IRL.

So listen up! Check back often. Follow us on Twitter. Send us comments! We’ll talk and post about this trip so much you’ll feel like you’re there. Minus the fresh-air deprivation and the strange sense that time has no meaning.

Wish us luck!  (At the trade show.  Not the casinos.  I mean, well, maybe at the slot machines…..)

This week we’re taking a look back at the best and worst in the momblogging world.  And, yes, we name names.  What were the events that left us cold and which events had us still talking 6 months later?  What PR pitches landed in our inboxes and made us smile?  And which made us hit DELETE so hard we almost broke the keyboard?  We heard from our listeners too – the best blog discoveries, the worst mistakes made by brands and the power of social media to make things happen.

We had Golden Halos galore this week (as well as plenty of Devil Horns.)  But you have to listen to the podcast for all of the juicy details and forgive us if we get a little corny at the end…

Best PR Pitches:

Heidi singled out Lexus/Toyota and the California Milk Advisory Board for their personalized, brief and specific invitations and pitches. They reached out like true professionals.

Rebecca gave a shout out to Planned Parenthood for a clear, intelligent and well-written pitch that had all the relevant information and knew exactly what her blog was about.

Amy praised The Motherhood for consistently good offers that made sense for her blog, had clear stipends and treated mombloggers with respect.

Nancy thinks PR maven Rob Wheat gets the “relations” part of Public Relations right.  He’s personal and personable as well as someone who knows how to create a two way relationship with bloggers.

Best In Real Life Events:

Amy loved the Wishbone dinner with Tyler Florence.  He actually cooked, talked and hung out with everyone – giving her plenty to tweet about.  Also, her trip to the Blue Bunny Ice Cream factory where she created her own ice cream flavor – who wouldn’t want some Selfish Mom ice cream?

Heidi had an incredible experience at the official launch of Kinect in LA.  From the well-done pitch and invite to the perfectly executed event everything about this trip showed how professional and on target the Kinect team was.

Nancy singled out BJs Warehouse for their informative, perfectly planned and expertly run blogger events that are on time and hands-on.  Their preparation and thought always shine through.

Rebecca loved the Intel Upgrade Your Life Events with their super smart speakers and geek-fest of information.  Plus the women who run the events are absolute mavens at what they do.  and… The Yahoo! Motherhood Summit which allowed concentrated time to focus on the women bloggers with great give and take between the bloggers and Yahoo!

Worst PR Pitches

Nancy mentions -  again – getting paid in PopTarts! (Does it ever get old?  No really, do Pop Tarts ever get old?)

Rebecca had to take PR people at Porter Novelli to task for their terrible Laughing Cow Cheese pitch that entailed a huge amount of work all for the chance to win a cheese basket.  And she never heard back from them after emailing them her rates.

Amy (and a multitude of other NYC bloggers as well) couldn’t get over the pitch to cover TLC’s Sarah Palin’s Alaska. Wrong city to launch that show.  But, she was especially peeved at Ogilvy PR for their disrespectful handling of their Ford campaign pitch to her – and again no follow up email from the PR rep before the trip.

Heidi won’t name names, but does hate when people don’t have the courtesy to use hers and instead address their pitch to   ”Dear Mommyblogger.”  Does that work for anyone?

Worst Events:

Collectively The Blogging Angels take brands to task for holding public events and then leading bloggers on to believe they are exclusive blogger events.   We are not seat fillers.

And please, don’t drag our kids into your poorly planned event!  (Also, $12 cotton candy is NOT OK – ever)

Our Listeners Best and Worst:

Melissa Chapman of Married My Sugar Daddy recounted her worst event when she was “invited” by Ralph Lauren to a Demi Lovato concert at the US Open and upon arrival found out she didn’t have real seats, while other bloggers did.   Not cool (especially in August with kids in tow.)

Kelly Whelan of The Centsible Life might have finally pushed Pop Tarts off their pedestal after telling us that a toilet paper company offered to pay her in…Toilet Paper!

IlinaP at Dirt and Noise told us that Type A Mom was the best conference she attended this year.  She also made us feel all lovey dovey towards Twitter when she recounted how a 2^nd grade boy  got eyeglasses almost immediately upon a tweet going out into the world requesting some help.

Marinka at Motherhood in NYC recommends the blog Lost in the Chaos as one of her best reads this year.  It somehow makes cancer and motherhood funny.  That has to deserve your attention.

…and when we say PC, we of course mean personal computer. But this episode we’re not talking about your average everyday PCs, just the pretty ones. The Blogging Angels all attended the Windows 7 Holiday PC Showcase in NYC and enticed Microsoft’s Ryan Asdourian and Ben Rudolph to join us on this podcast to chat about some of the beautifully designed PCs from the event, and their plans for the upcoming International Consumer Electronics Show.

Here are some of our fave designed PCs:

1. The Samsung “Shark” SF510 and “Storm” QX410 with built-in 4G wireless
2. Asus NX90 designed by Bang & Olufson designer David Lewis – this’ll light up your entire room with sound, and is gorgeous to boot.
3. Dell Inspiron Duo – a convertible device with a touchscreen. This was an early fave of all of the Angels. Check out Ben’s hands-on review of it.
4. Panasonic Toughbook C1 – made of magnesium, so strong but lightweight and has drainage channels so any liquid spills can drain out and not fry the motherboard. Yay!
5. Toshiba Satellite L635  Kids laptop – has a wipeable keyboard and comes preloaded with KidZui and Net Nanny
6. Sony Vaio J and HP Touchsmart 600 – powerful all-in-one computers with touchscreens
7. Origin Big O – a dream PC for serious gamers, this liquid-cooled PC has an Xbox 360 built in! it’s highly customizable and starts at $9,999. We saw it playing Call of Duty Black Ops in Ultra HD with 2560 x 1600 resolution at full frame rate AND Kinect. From the same computer. Wow.

Amy raved about her meshing experience with Microsoft Windows Live Mesh.

Rebecca recommends Windows Phone 7 as an ideal mom phone. . . and senior phone.

Ryan and Ben explained the Super AMOLED screen by Samsung and the shatter-resistant Gorilla Glass screens.

Ben amused all of the angels with his dancing Xbox avatar on his Windows Phone 7.

The annual International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is coming up the first week of January, and Microsoft Windows will be sponsoring the Blogging Angels travel. Ben and Ryan offer some advice on navigating your way through the 150,000 attendees and over 2500 exhibitors.

This week we’re breaking from tradition and replacing our usual Golden Halo awards with gifts we’re excited to give or hoping to get:

Amy’s hoping to receive a Sole F63 treadmill to help her train for the Disney Princess Half Marathon.

Ben will be handing out Kinects to his gift list, and wants the Lenovo U160.

Ryan is pumped to see people open their Kinects, and gift a Samsung Focus;  a Samsung SF410 is at the top of his wishlist.

Rebecca wants a blog redesign and already received her family’s favorite gift: Xbox 360 with Kinect.

Nancy wants Xbox Kinect, and can’t wait for her daughter to open the video game Karaoke Glee.

Heidi went for the bling because what would the Blogging Angels be without something sparkly? She can’t wait to have a dance party with her sisters on Christmas after they open their gifts.

Of course, we’re angels so we’re not just going to tell you about our experience at the PC Holiday Showcase, we’re giving you the opportunity to bring it directly to your doorstep with our Dell PC giveaway, sponsored by Intel. Go check it out to enter for yourself!

Full disclosure: Microsoft has supplied several members of the Blogging Angels with various computers and other products, including XBoxes and Kinects.

Tis the season…to realize you simply do not have enough time or money to get everyone on your list the perfect gift.  So what do you do?  Like any good social media junkie, you enter blog giveaways galore in the hopes of scoring something fantastic. You join in on Twitter parties where the giveaways keep on coming.

This week, The Blogging Angels are talking all about giveaways and twitter parties: how to run them, and  how to profit from them – in cold hard cash, swag you can use, or increased readership and followers.

Plus, we’ve got a giveaway of our own.  We’re giving away a brand spanking new top of the line Dell Inspiron 17R – a beautiful big-screened machine powered by the Intel Core i5 (which means it’s fast and furious!).

It’s also Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) enabled, which means that (with an adapter – not included) you can stream photos and video from your laptop wirelessly onto your TV screen – no more huddling around your laptop to watch Hulu or the latest DVD or ooh and ah over pics of your baby’s new tooth.

Intel supplies the “brains” (processors) inside all of our favorite computers, so they really know their stuff.  If you’re thinking of buying a laptop for the holidays (either as a gift or just for yourself!) they want you to know your stuff too.  Check out their laptop buying guide before you head to the store or your favorite online site to make that purchase.  And if you have more questions, ask their expert, Clayton, @IntelInside on twitter.  He’s got tips, tricks, and answers.

More on entering our giveaway at the end of this post, but first:

The Golden Halos go to:

Amy went first, which had Rebecca complaining that she stole her halo idea: the Cool Mom Tech Holiday Gift Guide.  Great gifting gadgets to get for everyone on your list.

Heidi, ever the nice one, gave her halo to Yahoo’s Ripple of Kindness initiative – a kind of “pay it forward” for the internet generation.

Rebecca again claimed to have her halo idea stolen by Nancy, who awarded her Golden Halo to the uber-small-businesses of Etsy.  A great site to buy handmade gifts from people – not corporations.

Finally, Rebecca got her own idea! She gave a halo to The Holiday Shops at Bryant Park, Grand Central Station, Columbus Circle, and Union Square, for their unique gifts and homey, old-fashioned feel. If you’re in NYC, it’s must stop shopping.

We also talked about…

Hannukah.  Well, somebody had to.  And Nancy claimed to have the best brisket recipe ever.  Amy asked what Brisket was…but never mind.

X-box 360 with Kinect. The gift that everyone wants, and that Heidi happens to be giving away on her blog.  Click on over and enter.

Traveling Mom Kim Orlando got a shout out for her superbly run twitter parties (every Monday night from 9-10 eastern #TMOM).

MamaBytes and Top Rank both got kudos for their posts on Twitter Party how tos.

Rebecca gushed over her love of all things Snapfish

Angel Amy talked about the giveaway rules page on her own site.  Her site.  Her rules.  Deal with it.

…And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for:  how to win that fabulous Dell Laptop.

Like we said in the podcast, we don’t like it when people have to jump through hoops just to get an entry: go here, do this, like that, then leave comment there and a separate comment for this…you’ve got better things to do with your time.

And speaking of time, according to our friends at Intel, today’s Core-powered laptops save you the equivalent of three days a year due to increased performance.  Three days!  To enter to win your very own WiDi-enabled Dell Inspiron 17R, leave a comment on this post telling us what you would do in 2011 with three extra days.

If you listened to the podcast you already know that there are a couple of bonus entries in addition to leaving a comment here.  You do not need to leave additional comments for those bonus entries – we know if you did what you were supposed to do.   You also have to be at least 18 years of age to enter, and the prize can only be shipped within the continental U.S.  The comments will close at noon-ish on Monday, December 20th 2010, and the winner will be chosen by random.org.  You must comply with the rules set forth in this post in order to be verified as the winner.

Good luck!

UPDATE: The comments on this post are now closed.  Thanks so much to everyone who entered our giveaway.

And the winner is…Mary, 24th comment down.  Congratulations Mary, we can’t wait to hear what you think of your new laptop!

Full disclosure: Intel has supplied several members of the Blogging Angels with various computers and other products, including the Dell Inspiron 17R.

Blogcation?  Twittercation?  Are people just making up words now?

This week the Blogging Angels discuss whether or not you can take a break from blogging and tweeting without negative repercussions. Will your clout suffer?  What about  your Klout?  And should you care?

They also discuss what happens when you whine publicly about opportunities you’re not getting or try to shamelessly mine other bloggers for their hard-earned contacts and connections.  For starters, Amy will make this face:

And the Golden Halos go to:

Rebecca gave a Golden Halo to her sister Jess Levey‘s site (angels love nepotism), Rising Shutterbug.  Want to learn how to take awesome pictures?  Check it out.  She also gave one to the site 4 Suitcases, about a family that took off for a  year of adventures, leaving jobs, schools and suburbs behind.

Nancy gave a Golden Halo to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, which gives some much-needed perspective on what’s going on outside of the momblogger world.  She also gave a Golden Halo to Golin Harris, for putting on a fantastic event for Nintendo.

Amy gave her Golden Halo to one of the funniest sites on the whole entire web, 27B/6.com.  Whether trying to pay a bill with a drawing of a spider or helping a coworker find her lost cat, David Thorne‘s humor is genius.

Heidi gave her Golden Halo to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which she got to visit during a fabulous trip to Universal Studios in Florida (courtesy of her husband’s job – angels also love disclosure).

And Nancy gave a bonus Halo to Danny, Heidi’s son, who stayed quiet through the entire recording session.

What we also talked about…

Amy uses Tweetdeck a lot.  Unless she has serious work to do, then she has to turn it off.

Compete, Alexa and Quantcast are three websites commonly used by PR firms to determine blog traffic.

And GayNYCDad got some love from Nancy.

This week we Angels are talking about the big news in the women’s blogging world: Silicon Valley Moms Group being bought out and moved over to Technorati’s Women’s Channel. All four Angels wrote for SVMoms (both NY and NJ) and met through this groundbreaking blogger community. But, times have changed and the world of blogging and social media has evolved. Will we go and sign up for the new Technorati gig? Tune in to find out where we stand on the big decision.

And yes this big news brought up the subject of getting paid – again! If you are a new blogger should community and connections be more important than monetary compensation? Is writing for “exposure” a real thing if there’s no way to measure your stats on another company’s site? Yeah, we take that on this week too.

Finally, in the midst of all these blogging opportunities how do you decide what is worth taking on and does your personal blog suffer when you take on corporate work, ambassadorships and contributing blogger positions?

This week we awarded special Golden Halos to those we are thankful for in tech and social media:

Nancy gave her halo to Jennifer aka Take2Mommy who made our gorgeous new Golden Halo button that our recipients can put on their blog. We put social media to the test when Nancy put out a request on Twitter for a button designer and were thrilled when @take2mommy offered to do it! We love when social media works for good.

Amy is loving how TV shows are now embracing social media. Her Halo went to the new CBS show The Talk [sorry, the link has expired - but trust us, Amy was awesome!]- a great example of a show that uses Twitter brilliantly to engage viewers. They are even doing a Follow Friday feature and they showcased Amy! (go to the 8 minute mark to see Amy’s fab webcam video)

Heidi gave 2 Halos (you know she’s the nicest of all of us right?) The first went to Tegu blocks and their amazing use of social media when they had the Tegu pro building whatever you Tweeted live! And Heidi is thankful for the brands and companies that hired her this year and took a chance on her!

Rebecca was in a very unAngelic mood this podcast, but still managed to find something to be thankful for – NetLingo so she can translate all of the crazy tweets and texts that come her way.

We are most thankful for our listeners and followers!! We love hearing from you, talking to you on Twitter and in real life and getting your feedback. So a giant Golden Halo to all of you!

The Angels are looking for a blog designer who’d love to make our site look as fabulous as our listeners deserve! Tweet us at @BloggingAngels or leave a comment below and let us know if you’d be interested in a heavenly redesign in exchange for serious Twitter and podcast love (the best kind).

Is Facebook “fanning” and “liking” the modern equivalent of yesteryear’s outstretched cootie catcher forcing you to decide: yes, no, maybe so?

With 560 million members, Facebook has become a powerful force in the social media space. The average user spends 20 minutes on the site per visit and half of Facebook members visit the site once a day. When many companies look to hire employees for social media, they’re often specifically looking for someone to manage their Facebook page – referred to as community building or presence management. But Facebook’s not without it’s issues – privacy and spam come to mind – but Facebook isn’t all former classmates, Mafia warriors and farmers, right?

In this episode, the Blogging Angels welcome special guest Rich Krueger, author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies, to school us on how bloggers can better leverage Facebook to grow their audiences and better interact with their community. For instance, have you created a public page for your blog? Are you pushing your blog posts to your update stream and have a “like” button on your site? Are you searching Facebook to join Groups related to your interests and blog focus?

Lend an ear and learn how you could grow your blog following using Facebook. Yes, there really is social media beyond Twitter and blogs…

This week’s Golden Halos:

Heidi awarded a golden halo to EM Tanner Designs for being so engaging in leveraging Twitter and Facebook…and for her adorable custom designs.

Amy loves metrics and numbers and gave a golden halo to Twitalyzer which does the difficult job of analyzing “influence.”

Nancy gave a golden halo to the movie Catfish where a guy befriends a family on Facebook and when he meets them in real life, all is not what it seems. The movie will make you rethink your social interactions, and if not, the protagonist is really, really cute, so you’ll thank her anyway.

Rebecca awarded a golden halo to Emily Nussbaum of New York Magazine for her piece on how TV portrays teen pregnancy.

Rich gave a golden halo shout out to Mike Murphy, the outgoing VP of global sales for Facebook, credited with leading its revenue growth the past four years.

In this episode we also talk about…

Rich’s company Samepoint, and how it can track real-time social media conversations across the Web. What’s being said about YOU?

You can follow Rich on Twitter @rkrueger

The Blogging Angels promise that if you like or fan us, we’ll return the favor. . .

Stay tuned as Nancy will regale us with her Aaron Sorkin stories during a future podcast

Look for more of Rich’s nuggets of Facebook wisdom in his soon-to-launch Facebook Advertising for Dummies

From the post on MarieClaire.com about CBS show Mike & Molly, to return on blogging relationships, to how male bloggers and female bloggers work differently with companies, there are a lot of hot topics online right now.  So, the Blogging Angels are introducing a new feature, What We’re Harping On! Join in, comment, and let us know what you’re harping on.

This week’s Golden Halos:

Nancy gave her golden halo to the Guru of New, who (she thinks) came up with the term “e-hole.”  And by extension gave one to Darryle Pollack of I Never Signed Up for This, which is how Nancy came across our favorite new term.  And yes, she also mentioned Faith Popcorn.

Amy gave her golden halo to Nicole over at Momtrends, who wrote a fantastic post about Blogging Event Basics.

Rebecca handed her golden halo to Twitalyzer, because she loves stats and Twitalyzer shows how positive – or negative – you are in your tweets.

And last but never least, Heidi gave her golden halo to the level, balanced piece that Chef Druck French Foodie Mom (formerly known as Chef Druck) wrote about High Fructose Corn Syrup.

And here’s what we were harping on this week…

Maura Kelly wrote about her distaste for watching fat people on TV, and brought a world of hate down on her own head.

Amy mentioned this mom blogger-vs-TSA debacle from last year.

Our friend – and seriously funny tweeter – Marinka had a great post about the whole “fatties on TV” thing.

Sugar Jones wrote about her frustration with the idea of Return on Relationships in the blogging and social media world.

Heidi brought the Angels lunch from Panera Bread, and it was hard for Amy not to eat right on top of her microphone.

Nancy is old.  (How old is she?)  She used to work here.

Mom bloggers and money: if you’re not Dooce or The Pioneer Woman, is there any to be made?

The good news is, yes.  This week the Blogging Angels discuss how their blogs make them money, whether directly through advertising and sponsored posts or indirectly through conference sponsorships or freelance writing jobs.

The bad news?  For most of us, blogging will not be a path to getting rich.  But money isn’t the only reason we’re blogging, right?  If we just wanted to make money we’d go work for somebody else!

Our Golden Halos (plus some devil horns!) for the week:

Rebecca gave devil horns to NYC School Food, for still serving chocolate milk with HFCS when there are many other chocolate milk options out there.

In contrast, Rebecca gave her halo to Wellness in the Schools.

Nancy gave her halo to @ProBlogger, because he can help you make money with your blog.

Heidi gave her golden halo to Another Lunch, which gives great ideas on making interesting lunches for your kids.

Amy gave her halo to Liz at Mom 101, for being a brilliant voice of reason in the sometimes hyper world of mom blogging.

And we also discussed…

Amy had great success with Blogads.com back when her main blog was FilmingInBrooklyn.com, but not so much on SelfishMom.com

OpenSky is a completely new way of selling products through your blog, and Ted Rubin is always happy to answer questions.

Adsense also did not work well for Amy, but some blogs make a ton off of Adsense ads.

It’s not just all about blog stats: your reach on Twitter and Facebook is important too.

Some different ways to track stats are Google Analytics, Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast.

PhD In Parenting had a good post about the HFCS debacle (as did Mom 101).

This week The Blogging Angels were lucky enough to have two Microsoft mavens guest angel on the podcast: Ben “The PC Guy” Rudolph and Lisa Worthington. The pretzel M&Ms were flowing as the Angels grilled Ben and Lisa about the ins and outs of Windows Live Writer and the best PCs for bloggers on the go (and yes you will be amazed by Ben’s insane PC hardware knowledge base). Do you want to know how bloggers should approach brands like Microsoft? What Microsoft looks for in a blogger and what you shouldn’t do when trying to work with a brand? How do the pros separate their personal and work lives online? Listen in this week and get the inside scoop on PR and blogger relationships and much more from these two incredibly well spoken guests! And at the very end is an earth (or Windows) shattering confession by one of our very own Angels…

Check out this week’s Golden Halos:

Nancy revealed that Smart Brief keeps her up to date on all the latest social media news so she can be extra smart every week.

Heidi threw a halo over – gasp! – a dad blogger, Howard Ludwig. Check out his thoughtful, well-written column Ludwig@Home on TheFatherLife.com.

Amy wanted to help a struggling new blog – CNET. Is there anywhere else worth going to for in depth reviews? No.

Rebecca loves Ellen Seidman in real life, and on her blog Love That Max. But, especially wanted to give her a halo for withstanding the crazy commenters on her Redbook Halloween article that Lisa Belkin wrote about.

Guest Angel Lisa gave her first ever halo to the Photography Corner on The Mom Bloggers Club. We concur that Jennifer James‘ site is full of fabulous advice for all aspects of blogging. (and we’re jealous of Lisa’s Nikon D5000)

Guest Angel (or Charlie?)Ben’s halo cast a golden glow around the Windows Phone 7. He’s been lucky enough to test it out for a while now and says it’s the first phone that allows him to get work done and get back to his life. Check out the cool new Windows Phone 7 commercials that we were watching before we began the podcast.

Here are links to some of the things we talked about this week:

What are Ben’s best PC recommendations for bloggers? We had to write them down, he has them all in his head…

Ultra portable: Asus UL Series, Toshiba R705, HP DM4, Sony Vaio Z (drool worthy)

Netbooks: Gateway LT320,HP Mini 311, Asus EEE PC 1215N

Ben singled out Ina Fried of CNet (remember them?) – as someone who is a true professional and someone he always looks forward to seeing

Lisa talked about the importance of a genuine relationship and cited Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet as a key person for her.

How do Lisa and Ben manage their twitter personalities? Follow them at @BenThePCGuy and @WinMommyLisa to find out.

If you’re a blogger, chances are you’ve been approached by a brand to do a review, attend an event, try their product or talk up their latest and greatest.

And that’s great. And complicated.

This week, The Blogging Angels are talking about brands and bloggers and how the two interact. What does a brand owe a blogger?  What do bloggers owe brands? How much loyalty can brands expect from unpaid bloggers? How much do they deserve?

It’s a tough topic, but somebody’s got to tackle it.

Do you have thoughts about how to deal with brands?   Have you had experiences — good or bad — you’d like to share?  Leave a comment below and join our conversation about blogs, brands and the best way to build relationships between the two.

Our Golden Halos for the most click-worthy posts and people on the web go to:

From Heidi: Mom in the City, because she knows how to work with brands.

From Amy - The Consumerist. Because they don’t take advertising, and they really, really crack her up.

From Nancy - MamaPundit’s post about how to talk to her after the death of her son. Not because it has anything to do with brands, but because it’s the best thing she’s read on the web — or anywhere – in a while.

From Becca –  The launch of LegoUniverse and the Lego brand.   Because she loves the the new game and the old school legos, loves working with them and thinks they do a great job of working with bloggers.

Here are some links about the brand events we talk about on the show:

Nancy and Rebecca talked about meeting two Food Network stars – Bobby Flay and Marcella Valladolid – in one week.

All of the Angels went to the Zumba Fitness Video game event, which was a blast, and also featured the super cool Microsoft Kinect for XBox.

Nancy mentioned the Mouthy Housewives brand-full event where she got an LG vacuum that literally scared the crap out of her dog.

And yes, Rebecca really did go to an event about toilet paper.   Which would be weird, except that Tori Spelling was there.  Oh, wait. Still weird.

Keep the comments and ideas coming!  We want to talk about what you want to hear. So let us know what’s on your mind.

Blogalicious, Mom 2.0, Blissdom. If you wanted to, you could practically go to a blogging conference every week. Which, come to think of it, would be fun, since blogging conferences tend to be as much social events as learning opportunities.
But most of us have lives outside of blogging.  We have houses to run, and kids to think about. Bills to pay. We can’t just be running off to every conference on the planet. We can’t afford to go to every conference.

So which conferences are worth attending? What makes a good conference? What works, what doesn’t, and what drives us absolutely bonkers when we go to them?

What are conferences for, anyway?

This week, the Blogging Angels are talking conferences: the good, the bad, and the annoying.

Listen in, then join in the conversation: What do you expect out of a conference? What makes them worthwhile? And what makes them a waste of your mighty minimal free time? Blogging Angels want to know.

This week’s Golden Halos go to the week’s most click-worthy sites.

Amy, after a half-hour of talking conferences, decided to give a Golden Halo to the one she loves most: Blissdom, where, she says “the trains always run on time!”

Heidi gave her halo to LaunchHer.com. Launch Her is all about helping women launch small businesses, or take their small businesses to the next level.

At Web 2.0, Rebecca heard Nick Bilton, NY Times lead technical writer and author of “I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works,” and kinda fell in (totally professional and non-stalkery) love. Her Golden Halo goes out to Bilton for his funny, charming, and smart take on tech.

This week, Nancy discovered tungle.me, an online scheduler that really does what it says it will: it makes your life easier. How? It lets everybody see when everybody else is available, and makes scheduling group meetings (or Blogging Angel Podcasts) a breeze.

Here are links to some of the other topics and sites we talked about this week:
Parallel Path offered some great SEO advice at Web 2.0
BlogWorld is the biggest Social Media Conference in the world.
CES is a gadget geek’s dream event!
Rebecca and Nancy met a NYC based blogger they’d never met before!! Nice to meet you NYC Girl at Heart!

When a laptop or cell phone is stolen, it’s pretty black-and-white: it’s theft, it’s wrong, and you know your property is gone.  But what about words?  What happens when you put your heart and soul into your blog, only to find your words on someone else’s site, your stories stolen?  What about if your ideas are stolen and put into other words, is that theft?  And what can you do if this happens to you?

This week the Blogging Angels talk about the problems of plagiarism and scraping online, and how you can find out if you’ve been a victim and don’t even know it.

Check out this week’s Golden Halos, our top picks for who’s worth checking out:

Amy gave her golden halo to The Work at Home Woman, who listed her picks for the 50 best blogs by women, divided up into handy categories.  (Thanks for including Amy on the list – the check is in the mail.)

Heidi spotlighted Dear Crissy’s post about when it’s appropriate to ask other mom bloggers for advice.

Rebecca gave her shoutout to Slate.com and their podcasts, which inspired the Blogging Angels to start their own.

Nancy wants us all to check out Dawneing.blogspot.com, who is outside of our little NYC parenting world and writes about her life as a pediatric nurse for terminally ill children.

Plus, here are links to some other sites and topics we discussed this week:

A completely plagiarized site was discovered recently because a reader recognized something she’d originally read on TheBloggess.com.

Google Alerts can be a useful (if time consuming) way to check and see if your work is being stolen.

All you need to know about copyrighting your work can be found at Copyright.gov.

Tradmarks are more complicated (and expensive) than copyrights – learn about trademarking here.

The Yahoo Style Guide is a very handy resource for online writers.

Copyscape.com is a handy (and free) way to check and see if a particular post was stolen.  Automatic and batch checking, though, will cost  you.

BlogHer had a good post about the recent plagiarism scandal, but some of The Angels were irked that the perpetrator wasn’t outed.

Our friend Carol, who writes NYCityMama.com, had a big problem with plagiarism a while back when someone stole her entire site.

Kim from MomInTheCity.com told the famous story about the family whose picture ended up on a billboard in Europe – without their knowledge or permission!

Cliques, mean girls, bullies and private notes made public.  We’re not talking about Junior High we’re talking about Twitter!  Join us this week as The Blogging Angels take on what’s naughty and nice about life in social media. Can you just add a smiley face at the end of  a mean tweet and make it OK?  Do you have to follow back everyone who follows you?  What is the right thing to do on Follow Friday?  How do you handle sociopathic commenters?  Do you have a little Emily Post whispering in your ear as you blog and tweet or do you let it all hang out?  Find out where we fall on all of these and other social media etiquette issues.  And let us know what you think in the comments!

Our Golden Halos of the Week go out to these MUST follow twitter peeps:

Nancy gave a shout and laugh out to the always witty and funny @MarinkaNYC

Amy shined a light on the lovely @JenniferPerillo – chef, food writer and all around uber-classy twitter babe

Heidi illuminated the girl power, positive energy promoting @BeyondPaleGal

Rebecca sent good education vibes to @DeborahMersino and her #gtchat an invaluable resource for Gifted Ed.

Here are links to some other people and things we discussed this week:

Nancy’s post about Twitter as Junior High and her other post about her Psychopathic commenter are sure to hit home.

The Bloggess doesn’t need our link love, but she sure is brilliant about how she doles it out.

Do you assume DMs are private?  You shouldn’t and our discussion about what went down between Mega Bloggers, Jessica Gottlieb and Katja Presnal will tell you why.

On this week’s podcast we’re dishing on our own blogging backgrounds, if the personal blog is dead and if Twitter has become the true arbiter of influence. Can you be both a great writer and successful blogger or is the lure of product reviews and giveaways too strong to resist?   After a long day on Twitter do you have anything left to blog about? Join us as we dissect these social media conundrums and let us know where you fall on the personal blogger spectrum.

Here are links to some of the many topics we discuss this week:

Amy was named Funniest Twitter Mom by Babble.com. If you listen to our podcast you’ll know why.

The wonderful food blogger and chef Jennifer Perillo most likely cried herself to sleep after learning that Amy ate at The Olive Garden in Brooklyn.

Rebecca spent an entire month in Italy last summer and blogged the entire trip. Every day!

Looking for real tech reviews written by women, Heidi writes for techlicious.

Nancy defended the personal blog with the great memoirist Uppercase Woman also know as @cecilyK

And this week we start our weekly Golden Halo Awards to the people, products, posts, articles or tweets online that earned a special Blogging Angel shout out.

This week:
Fantage – this online gaming site stands by their product and their users
Arnold Schwarzenegger is funny at the expense of Sarah Palin– who knew?
@dopeysmom finally started her blog It’s Always An Adventure about life in NYC
NPR reported on the five worries parents should drop and five they shouldn’t
Call Me Pretty detailed her trip to the Black Hills and life in South Dakota

Remember those long ago summer days when you used to hop on your bike in the morning and not return until dinner? Remember walking to school when summer was over? Remember when there weren’t internet predators? Or even an internet?

Today, kids face a totally different set of safety issues than we did…and a lot of the same ones, too.

This week, The Blogging Angels talk about when kids should be allowed to do what. From going to sleepaway camp, to walking to school, to getting their own cell phone.

How much independence should we – can we – give our kids?

Listen in on our conversation, and then leave your thoughts below. How much freedom can kids handle?

You can also subscribe to The Blogging Angels on iTunes!

Here’s a list of links to some of the sites we talk about in this podcast.

Which of these game sites are your kids obsessed with: Road Blocks, Club Penguin, Fantage or all three?

Read more about the mom who put her nine year old on the NYC Subway alone and lived to tell the tale at Free Range Kids.

Get information on how to keep your kids safe online at Bitmoms.com

Find safe routes to school and become part of keeping NYC school kids safe at Schools Unite Network, SUN.

Thinking about sleepaway camp? Try the Camp Lady. No charge to you and it helps. A lot.

For more information on internet safety from a mom who knows, check out More Than Mommy on about.com.

The terms “swag” and “freebie” get thrown around the blogging world with wild abandon.  But what do these terms really mean?  What constitutes swag, and is a freebie really free?  Are these products yours to do with what you wish, or are there unwritten rules about giving away or selling “free” products?

This week The Blogging Angels discuss the strange phenomenon of this new-ish form of advertising, where products are spread far and wide to mom bloggers in the hopes that something good will get written.

Join The Blogging Angels for our second podcast, What is Swag?

You can also subscribe to The Blogging Angels on iTunes!

We love to talk, but some things you have to see for yourselves.  Here are some links from the podcast:

Yup, we’re still talking about BlogHer, since swag is always a contentious issue at the mother of all female blogger conferences.

Despite the fact that Amy wasn’t invited to the Nate Berkus launch party, she still loves him and will be his new show‘s biggest fan.

Did Verizon overstep its bounds demanding that a blogger un-sell the phones she received to review?

Amy’s sponsor for BlogHer10 was eBay Classifieds, a free, local classified listing site.

Heidi writes for Techlicious.com, check it out!

We mentioned the new-ish FTC guidelines for paid product endorsements a few times – check them out for yourself, or take a look at PR pro Sarah Evans’ excellent summary.

Beth Feldman (Role Mommy) didn’t want to get paid in Pop Tarts.  Who can blame her?  They’re tasty, but they don’t pay the mortgage.

But what about getting paid in Jill Sander clothing (as Rebecca’s aunt did) or Frigidaire appliances (as Amy did)?  They won’t pay the mortgage either, but would their value make it more worthwhile? Hmmm…

Amy discloses her brand relationships in a way that borders on ridiculous, but at least you can’t accuse her of being vague.  Check our her disclosure page here, or steal this version for yourself.

The NJ Moms Blog and NYC Moms Blog (along with the rest of the SV Moms Group blogs) are no longer posting anything new, but there’s still a wealth of old posts to be read.

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And don’t forget, we’re looking for a tagline to end each podcast with.  Leave your suggestions in the comments, and we’ll give a big shout out and link to you if we end up using yours!

The swag has been unloaded, the business cards gone through.  Your feet are finally not sore, but your head is still spinning. Yes, BlogHer 2010, held August 6-7 in New York City, is over.

BlogHer, for those of you who don’t know (or who do, but couldn’t make it), is an annual conference of women bloggers.  This year, 2400 women (and a few men) showed up for a whirlwind weekend of informative sessions, inspiring speeches, wild parties, big brand events, new friendships, minor controversies, major swag, and a healthy dose of community.

In our inaugural podcast, The Blogging Angels talk about it all: The Best and Worst of BlogHer 2010.

We are big name droppers.  Here are some links from the podcast so you can see what all the fuss is about:

The mother of all blogging conferences : BlogHer

Don’t tell us you don’t give a tweet.  Try out  Twitter for yourself (and follow us while you’re there)

Wanna do some good?  Check out Bloganthropy

Think you can’t run for office?  Think again and read all about The White House Project

Who had the best product giveaways at BlogHer? SocialLuxe Lounge and Getting Gorgeous

And who showed women how to use tech in new and interesting ways? Microsoft Suite and Firefox Suite

And a shout out to a fab blogger we all adore and who stood up to Padma’s intense judging: Melissa Chapman