For anyone who has not yet logged on to the addictive world of Mumsnet – and this is an ever-decreasing number, given the site’s 350,000 monthly users, endorsements by Gordon Brown, David Cameron and the Chief Rabbi, and current media ubiquity – the nearest reference point for the uninitiated might, perhaps, be the BBC’s depiction of the female-dominated and fictional village of Cranford.

Watching the dramatisation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s book again last night, I was struck by how little difference there is between 1842 and 2008. Bonnets aside, Cranford’s inhabitants fret about ageing, set about their daily tasks with stoic humour, perv the arrival of the hot new doctor, swap modish recipes, lose their minds over their children, struggle to make ends meet, adjust to a period of social, political and sexual upheaval, and talk, talk, talk at each other until the cows come home. One woman’s drunkard husband leaves her with five children, there is a heated exchange about Dickens and the whole village gathers round to support a bereaved woman – walking with her, behind the coffin, although they have known her only for a matter of days. And then they all talk, talk, talk some more.

Without much exaggeration, that’s a typical week in the life of Mumsnet (www.mumsnet.com). Children, literature, death and power-chatting. And, of course, the outer limits of ludicrousnessity, if I might invent such a word. The incident in Cranford where a cat eats a valuable piece of French lace, to the dismay of the screaming women, could have been posted on Mumsnet yesterday. Not least the solution the women eventually came up with: trapping the animal inside a giant, knee-high boot, force-feeding it an emetic and then rescuing the partially digested accessory with an air of triumph.

For anyone who remembers the afternoon on Mumsnet when a mother pleaded for help after her child’s hamster fell into a pan of soup (the bone-dry reply, “Hamsters aren’t like aspirin – they don’t just dissolve,” provided much-needed succour at the time), the differences between 1842 and 2008 may seem slight.

But while Gaskell’s village would be celebrating a putative 166th anniversary, 2008 is only the eighth year of Mumsnet’s existence. This has been marked by a six-book deal with Bloomsbury – starting with The Mumsnet Guide to Toddlers, which will be published next year. This is, presumably, to transfer a piece of the potent Mumsnet vibe to a different medium, and/or allow people temporarily denied wi-fi access – those on the Tube, perhaps, or in Scotland – to read a gigantic, semi-deranged rant about Fruit Shoots or to pick up tips on how to loosen a jammed zip with a pencil.

It’s easy to see why there is an eagerness for a series of Mumsnet manuals covering babies, child-rearing, relationships and other subjects of interest to women and parents. Over the years, the idea of a single, authoritarian, declamatory expert has seemed progressively more out of date – not least when they’re subsequently discredited or proved to be totally deranged. In the vacuum where these prescriptive, often childless experts (Claire Verity, Gina Ford, “Supernanny” Jo Frost) used to lecture, has come the blossoming Web 2.0 era of collaborative content. YouTube, Wikipedia, 4chan, abeerintheevening, Facebook – they all function on the principle that everyone has at least one thing that would be of interest and value to a wider audience. The wisdom of the crowd really is starting to look wise, all things told.

Or, as Justine Roberts, co-founder of Mumsnet, puts it: “People can get a bit embarrassed about being seen to read a manual on a subject. It makes you look a bit… lost. But people aren’t embarrassed about saying they refer to Mumsnet, because it’s a manual that isn’t a manual – it’s modern, it’s democratic. All parenting advice tends to be hard-won, and these parents really want to share what they’ve learnt in a very enthused way. It talks up to you. And it has a lot of humour.”

Indeed, the two main selling points of Mumsnet are its potent community spirit and its humour. Humour is always a vital, in-built part of peer-to-peer conversation in a pressurised situation (see also: gays, immigrants, everyone during the War), and the sleep-deprived, under-valued and often lonely world of Mumsnet is no exception. If you don’t find at least one post an hour that makes you burst out laughing, you’re simply clicking on too many “for sale” threads. Take the woman who reeled in horror on discovering that her husband peed sitting down on the toilet (“I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel differently about him”). Or the poster who tentatively asked if anyone else’s husband makes pirate noises during sex. Or the day the wife of journalist Jon Ronson came online to defend her husband against accusations that he had a “pathetic, high voice”, and indignantly asked of Mumsnet as a whole: “Are you all in institutions?” And the complex chain of events that resulted in one mother watching a small, perfectly cuboid piece of child poo travel serenely down the check-out at Sainsbury’s.

“The typical Mumsnetter might not be rich, but she probably is well-educated,” Roberts says. Seventy-three per cent are educated to degree standard and 20 per cent have gone on to postgraduate study. Among their numbers, there are half a dozen journalists, a geneticist and a justice of the peace (Roberts is a former global economist and sports journalist and her site

co-founder, Carrie Longton, was a TV producer). These aren’t frivolous Yummy Mummies, then, or slap-dash Slummy Mummies – but, perhaps, Funny Mummies. Or, on occasion, Bummy Mummies.

Once sucked in by the humour, many posters tend to stay. Over the years, Mumsnet has built up an identifiable community, with a retinue of tribal elders and a mechanism that can swing into formidable and effective action should any member need help. At one extreme, this meant help for a mother whose child had lost her favourite doll – a strawberry-shaped item bought in a charity shop. She posted a photo of the now unobtainable doll on the website and wailed: “My child is crying herself to sleep!” A replica was tracked down – in the house of a fellow poster’s mother – and sent to her within a week. At the other end of the spectrum, mothers have posted after suffering domestic abuse or losing their children to cot death or losing their partners. On the most notable occasion, one posted her suicide note on the site under a pseudonym and then overdosed. Other posters managed to work out who she was, call an ambulance and get her to hospital in time to have her stomach pumped. Within hours, they’d worked out a temporary rota to look after her children and then subsequently raised enough money for sufficient childcare while she recovered.

More recently, a woman who had miscarried was told she would have to have her abortion in a hospital’s labour ward. Members were so outraged – many recalling their own, similarly traumatic experiences – that within 24 hours they raised enough money for her to go private.

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