Did you know that blogging can be a lucrative small business? And it can save you time on commuting and dressing for the office, says this media-star mom. Alhough I came to mothering late, giving birth to my older daughter, Christina, at age 38, I was drawn to the power of blogging very early on. In fact, I remember reading my first blog just as the new century was beginning. In case you're unfamiliar with the term "blog," it's short for weblog, a kind of self-published Internet journal. The first blogs in the 1990s were basically online diaries posted for all to read by intrepid Internet pioneers. But since then blogs have become lucrative small businesses and one of the world's biggest sources of news, opinion and entertainment.

I first wrote about the power of blogging on December 19, 2002. Then, less than a year ago, on May 9, 2005, I launched the Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com), a news and opinion blog site facilitating interesting online conversations, as if around the dinner table. It's my small part in changing our world for the better.

Why am I so drawn to blogging? I love bloggers' passion and relentlessness. Bloggers will often start with a small story or a piece of a story—a contradictory quote, an unearthed document, a detail that the big media outlets deem too minor to cover—and stay on it day after day, sometimes hour after hour. As we all know, a detail is only minor until, well, it's not.

I also love the conversational, intimate nature of this craft. You can practice it from home anytime of the day or night in your pajamas or sweatpants—without ever having to put on makeup and drive to a studio.

And that's why blogs are both the biggest breakthrough in popular journalism since Thomas Paine and what I think is the greatest gift to working mothers since telecommuting. I don't know about you, but I can't remember a day since I became a mother more than 16 years ago that I haven't felt guilty. Sometimes I think they take the baby out and put the guilt in!

But fortunately, Christina and her sister, Isabella, now 16 and 14, have both known from an early age that they can walk into their mom's office and interrupt anything, anytime. They always have the first claim on my attention. And if I can eliminate commuting and dressing for the office, all that extra time can be poured into my kids.

That to me is the biggest advantage of blogging as a career: the flexible deadlines. You can put your kids to bed and blog in the middle of the night. You can cut down on your blogging if one of your children gets sick. You can blog up a storm when they're off at camp—or, if you're divorced and single as I am, when they're spending time with their dad.

Even on this flexible schedule, a blogger mom can still reach the world—or the niche she is trying to target. Her possibilities are limitless. Can you imagine a more perfect job for a working mother? No wonder 43 percent of bloggers are female!

Because even after we break through every glass ceiling, working mothers still have to navigate, however imperfectly, the private demands of children and work on our lives. So building a profitable small business like my blog, the Huffington Post—one that's now growing fast?is a perfect challenge for a working mother.

My partner in creating the Huffington Post, Kenny Lerer, has a deep understanding of marketing, advertising and the news industry. He has the business background that I lack, despite my degree in economics. So he complements my own strengths and weaknesses, and I love working with him. Our partnership has freed me up to concentrate on the content of the blog.

The idea behind the Huffington Post was to combine breaking news with an innovative group blog—a site where some of the country's most creative minds could weigh in on topics great and small, political and cultural, important and just plain entertaining.

I've invited more than 500 other bloggers to contribute, and you just never know who is going to be blogging next. It could be screenwriter and director Nora Ephron, turning her searchlight on journalist Bob Woodward. Or Bradley Whitford from The West Wing, complaining about an IRS investigation of the Pasadena church he attends. Or author Deepak Chopra on mind-body medicine. Or Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David, sharing his roving insomniac thoughts.

Unlike the conversations around my dinner table, the ideas, insights and jokes on the Huffington Post don't evaporate when my guests go home. And there are photos and videos for you to look at, too. The content is even archived and available for review. It can be shared, linked to, and commented on by everyone. And it is translated into page views, available for online advertising!

This is the engine that drives most blogs to profitability. We've seen exponential ad growth since we first went to market in August. New top-tier marketers are signing with us each month. And the best part is that even my kids think blogging is cool. Arianna Huffington is the cofounder and editor of HuffingtonPost.com, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of ten books, including her latest, Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America. She is also cohost of Left, Right & Center, public radio's popular political roundtable program. She lives in Los Angeles with her two daughters. She can be reached at arianna@huffingtonpost.com.