"Around the office, a lot of us were having babies," babble.com editor Ada Calhoun, a past editor at nerve.com, says in a telephone interview from her Manhattan office.

For essays meant to spark debate, Calhoun deliberately turns to authors - novelists, playwrights and magazine writers - who never wrote about parenting issues until babble.com came calling.

For Calhoun, it's the ability to spark an ongoing exchange of ideas that makes the Internet the ideal medium for a parenting magazine. Whatever the issue, someone is probably discussing it somewhere on the site. And if not, anyone can start a new discussion.