Apologies for lack of recent blogging, but I’ve been laid low in recent days by a mystery virus, which involved a high temperature, horrible, pounding headache and general feeling-grottyness.

Now that I’ve recovered the will to live, normal blogging service will be resumed.

Look! The mirrormirror blog can now be found on the Delightful Blogs directory (look here under Personal Journals – you’ll need to scroll down a bit). I’m really pleased because every blog on this directory is hand-vetted for delightfulness, so I’m glad we made the grade.

Readers are also invited to rate and comment on the individual blogs, so I’d be quite nausea-inducingly appreciative if you fancied popping along and giving the mirrormirror blog a really high score.

(By the way, the blogs are indeed delightful, so it’s well worth having a browse, and if you’ve got a blog why don’t you submit yours too?)

This made me laugh. I have trouble enough finding a babysitter! But maybe I shall employ them next time I go on holiday. (Found via SwissMiss’s wonderful blog).

Are you a blogger? Do you face some no-internet-days, holidays or something else that keeps you from updating your precious blog? And you know that a blog without daily updates dies very fast?

Don’t worry any longer! blogsitter.net is the platform for bloggers who need caring people to sit their blogs. Register and place your advertisement to search for a fitting blogsitter. Someone who has your skills in the field of your blog, someone who is trustful and eager to care about your blog.

Much excitement in mirrormirror land over the last couple of days, as the worldwide exposure gained by Petite Anglaise (check out her press page now), and thus for mirrormirror’s clumsy blogad, has resulted in traffic to the mirrormirror site going through the roof.

Visitor-wise yesterday was our best day ever, yes, even better than the 14th December last year, when we were mentioned by the Times as one of the best places to shop online, and it’s looking like today will be equally as good.

The interesting thing though is that, to date, the Petite Anglaise-related traffic has not generated a single additional order. Yep, that’s right – nothing, zip, zilch, nada. Probably because many of these visitors will be from overseas and/or incandescent with indignation and hence not in the mood to buy fancy embroidered cushions from an online store in the UK.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, as I’m sure this sort of exposure can only be good for the business and it will be interesting to see whether it bears fruit in future months.

However, it has been useful to observe how little impact on the bottom line traffic which does not derive from our target demographic is having . The message both for bloggers trying to monetize their blogs and people advertising on blogs is that while traffic is important, you should focus squarely on the number of conversions in order to get a real picture of how well that ad is doing.

And yes, it does help that I’m married to someone in the web analytics industry who can provide me with the software tools to measure such things.

I first started reading Petite Anglaise at the beginning of the year. I can’t remember now how I came across her but I was captivated from the minute I started reading.

I could identify with her blog on so many levels. An English ex-pat living in Paris, she is currently living the life of a single girl, having left a long-term relationship in her early thirties – as I did. I too was a ‘petite anglaise’ many moons ago when I spent a year in Perpignan as part of my university course. She even has a little girl who sounds not unlike a slightly more grown-up version of the Minx.

The other thing that attracted me was the elegance, wit and intelligence of her prose (something I could never hope to emulate) and the way she cleverly uses allusions, cliffhangers and cryptic asides to build up the suspense. It’s as good as a novel and I read her entire blog in one weekend.

We emailed each other a couple of times and she invited me to place an ad on her site. Said ad has since delivered a small but consistent stream of traffic and a few orders – until today when this happened.

Petite was fired by her English employers, who thought that her blog was bringing their firm into disrepute – despite the fact that the blog was anonymous and the firm unrecognisable and scarcely mentioned. Petite is now taking the case to a French industrial tribunal in a test case which will have important ramifications for the relationship between bloggers and their employers (how grateful am I that I don’t have one of those). Her case has been taken up by the Daily Telegraph and she has been interviewed on Radio 5 Live. The story has now appeared in newspapers and on news websites around the world (editing to say that as of this morning there are stories in the Daily Mail, Independent and Times- check out Petite’s press page) and the blogosphere (how I hate that term) is aflame. It’s fascinating to watch a story go global like this, in a way that would never have happened even five years ago. (It’s also amusing to note that her employers, previously anonymous, were named in the Telegraph interview and are now being engulfed by a tidal wave of bad publicity).

I just hope things work out for Petite and that she’ll come out of this with the book or film deal (and the compensation) which she so richly deserves.

mirrormirror is currently running two blog ads. As well as the one on Petite Anglaise, we have an ad on Guido Fawkes’ Blog of Parliament. Mr Fawkes, too, has been all over the papers recently as the blogger on the case of John Prescott and Lord Levy. The message is clear. If you want unimaginable fame and notoriety as a blogger then sell adspace to ‘mirrormirror’. Do you dare?