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It's not always easy to get together with friends and family when you have little ones to feed, nurture and clean up after. Online communities are connecting moms with those who live far away, up the street or down memory lane. The best part is that it can all be done while the kids are napping or playing nicely.

Here are some of the most popular ways that online communities are helping people stay connected:

Blogs are an abbreviation for "Web logging" and are a tool for creating a public, online journal. Mothers today are the most influential bloggers. Mommy bloggers share photos, authentic mothering stories and a glimpse of their lives with friends and family through this simple online format. Mom bloggers also network together to share the latest trends, information and resources. Popular blog hosts include WordPress (wordpress.com), Blogger (blogger.com) and LiveJournal (livejournal.com).

Vlogs (video blogs) are a creative way to bring a new dynamic into sharing your live events. Posting videos on sites like YouTube (youtube.com) or social networking sites allows friends and family to experience life events as they happen.

Twitter.com is an up-and-coming online networking phenomenon. Users microblog short updates (about 30 words) that are delivered in real-time to other Twitter users through both Web and phone applications. User updates perpetually answer the question, "What are you doing?" It's a fast way to share information in your network. Recently, an avid Twitterer introduced a special networking site called TwitterMoms.com where moms can interact through interest groups and network with fellow-mom bloggers.

Flickr.com and Shutterfly.com are popular image and video hosting sites that allow users to create albums to easily share birthdays, special events and milestones. Photos and videos are uploaded to the site and users can share links to these albums where friends and family can view the albums and purchase prints directly through the Web site.

Social networking sites build online communities of people with similar interests, backgrounds or locations. Most of these sites include the same main features including personal messages, photo albums, blogging applications and the ability to post comments on friends' pages. Social networking is the commonly used way of connecting online. The most popular social networking sites are Facebook and MySpace, but many moms are discovering a unique community through Café Mom.

Facebook.com is the largest networking site with 175 million users. Profiles on Facebook are clean and uniform, but can include any of the thousands of applications. A user's home page on Facebook uniquely displays the news feed which includes updates and activity by the user's friends. One of Facebook's strengths is its customizable privacy settings allowing users to control the amount of information that's available to other users.

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