20 signs you need a blogging intervention
I was chatting on the phone to my bloggy friend Josie from Sleep is for the Weak a few days ago.

We were giggling at those tragic people who take their blogging and Tweeting so seriously that they forget to actually have real lives to blog about. Ha ha. Yeah, I bet some of those people are so obsessed with blogging they check Twitter in the supermarket, she sniggered.

There was a long pause.

“Erm, actually, I do that,” I confessed.

Another pause.

“I would too, if I had a smartphone.”

So basically, we ARE the sad obsessed people that other people laugh at. In fact, maybe it’s got to the stage that we need an independent third party to stage an intervention and make us STEP AWAY from the Internet.

After some thought, I’ve put together a proper, scientific set of diagnostic criteria for parent blogging addiction. I’d like to make clear that I have NEVER met a single one of these criteria at any time. Nope. Not a one*.

Are you addicted to social media?

(* This may be a total lie)

How about you? How many of these will you admit to?

  1. Five minutes after posting on your blog, you find yourself feverishly hitting refresh demanding, “Why has nobody commented yet?”  
  2. You accidentally refer to your friends by their Twitter user names.
  3. You’re in a bad mood all day if your traffic stats fall.
  4. You can name your blog’s top 10 referring sites – from memory.
  5. You find yourself tweaking the family Christmas cards for better SEO.
  6. When someone un-follows you on Twitter, you have to fight the urge to ask them what their problem is.
  7. You bought a smart phone, basically so you can check Twitter while you’re enjoying quality parent/child time.
  8. You can’t nominate in the MADs because you cannot possibly narrow down your favourite blogs to JUST ten.
  9. Your pre-schooler already knows how to open Tweetdeck.
  10. When you take a photo of your kids, they say, “Is this for your blog?”
  11. You can’t remember your children’s shoe size, but you know your Technorati score by heart.
  12. You come out in a cold sweat at the mere thought of your broadband connection going down.
  13. When your partner accuses you of blogging too much, you immediately write a blog post asking, “Am I blogging too much?” 
  14. If you don’t Tweet for more than two hours, people start to worry you’ve fallen down a well.
  15. You need a new blog theme so you can fit in more awards from doing memes
  16. You want to cry when you lose a Google follower.
  17. You can’t remember the last conversation you had with your sister that wasn’t on Facebook.
  18. When dressing in the morning, you automatically assess your outfit for potential v-log suitability.
  19. You can remember exactly where you were when you found out your Twitter followers had hit triple figures.
  20. When something expensive in your house breaks you find yourself thinking, “Oh well, it’ll make a great blog post”.