Carl C
Small business coach, building high performace online presence for my clients
Have you hosted a blog carnival on your blog? How did you do it and what were the results? What would you do differently?
I've recently read a bit about blog carnivals and even though I've written for one in the past (for Jason Alba @ JibberJobber) I don't know anything about hosting one. We are considering hosting a carnival on our new blog [www.interviewondemand.com/blog] and want to know what are some of the 'gotchas' to look out for as well as what are some things
Clarification added December 28, 2007:
to make sure that you do do.
Answers (3)
Bill A
Bill Austin - Internet Marketing & SEO Expert
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I have hosted the Carnival of the Recipes quite a few times.
I will be hosting it again starting Sunday with a theme of Traditional New Years Food.
The biggest "Gotcha" for hosting is not understanding the concept.
The idea of a Carnival is that it travels from blog to blog, just like the carnival with the circus travels from town to town.
The second big problem is getting people to participate on a regular basis and keeping your own and their interest levels up.
Blogcarnival.com can help with that. It makes it easier to manage, easier to get each week's contributions collected, easier to create and publish the end result. Link #1 below will get you there.
Take a look at the main host (maintainer) page below (second link) for an idea of how to promote it on your site.
Keep an eye out for the New Years Edition on Sunday and all next week at the third link below.
Links:
I have hosted the Carnival of the Capitalists since it began. I just hosted for the fourth time (in four years) about two weeks ago.
Carnivals were great when they started out. But over time, they attracted the worst of the blogosphere, self promoting spammer types rather than real, thoughtful articles written by ordinary people. And my impression is that readership has dwindled accordingly. In the past, when I hosted the Carnival of the Capitalists, I'd see a noticeable boost in my hit logs. Now it's barely noticeable.
My general advice is that it's a lot of work to go through, read all the entries, and then edit a blog entry summarizing them all. And these days, the reward doesn't seem to be there, either in terms of the quality of the articles submitted, or the traffic generated. It honestly wouldn't surprise me to see carnivals disappear in the near future.
Links:
Robert S also suggests this expert on this topic:
Marshall E
Experienced Technical Professional
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It seems I have been invoked. I'm the guy who for all practical purposes defined what a "blog carnival" is, in terms of taking the original inspiration of Carnival of the Vanities and adapting it to carnivals defined by topic.
That said, I agree with Rob Sama on the current state of blog carnivals, and the existence of "Blog Carnival" has been both useful and at the heart of the concept's collapse. If I wanted to start something that was the conceptual heir of a blog carnival from scratch these days, I would not name it a carnival, try to distinguish it clearly, and promote accordingly.
That said, I have an important question right up front: Do you mean you want to HOST a carnival, as in hosting one week's edition? Or do you mean that you want to CREATE a carnival and be the sponsoring or home blog for it? That's two very distinct answers, though knowing the former would give insight to the latter. Which means that if you are thinking of creating a carnival, having hosted some other carnival first might be informative. For that matter, so might participating in some other carnival.
If the question is merely one of hosting, then much depends on the rules and guidelines of the carnival in question. Do you link all entries? Do you have standards? Themes? In brief, hosting a blog carnival edition is about getting the submissions, reading the posts and screening them as needed, and composing a post on your blog that links to them in some appropriate and readable form. I've given hosts who were unsure blow by blow descriptions, but that shouldn't be necessary.
I'm going to assume you mean you're thinking of starting a blog carnival. I've answered that one directly many times, as well as having people extrapolate from seeing what I'd done.
Pick a topic or niche. Perhaps leave some flexibility to expand or contract if it's too big or small as originally stated. See if one already exists that covers the same thing, and decide whether to duplicate or not. Don't use the same name as another carnival.
Pick a period of time between editions. Weekly is the norm, but monthly ones have long existed. In keeping with that, pick a publication day and a cutoff day and time for new entries. You might see what days are most popular, like Monday, and go with another. You might also base the day on some associated factor, like CotC being on Monday on the idea of people starting the week with a collection of the prior week's best posts on business and economics to peruse.
Have a page or site that is the home of the carnival, where you can have information, rules, guidelines, links to past editions, and future hosts listed. Most new carnivals rely on "Blog Carnival" for some of this, to the point where people sometimes take "Blog Carnival" to be the authority over and prime source of info your carnival.
A carnival isn't a "real" carnival unless it migrates from blog to blog, as opposed to being always hosted by one blog. It's fine to run it in-house a while to get a handle on it, get it established, and be comfortable understanding what your hosts will run into. It's just not truly a carnival if the plans is for it never to move around.
Promotion is important. CotC exploded out of the gate in part by being a new concept the blogosphere was ready for in 2003, and partly due to strong participation and linkage. If you're starting a blog in a particular niche, you will want to get word out to likely entrants. Those are also people who can give you sanity checks when the idea is new and still in flux.
Have some care with who hosts, and that they understand what is involved.
If you host one or more of the early editions, you set the standards for how lax or strict to be in practice, as far as allowing off-topic, excessively spammy or self-promoting entries, etc.
It's your carnival (or not-a-carnival, if you go with the advice near the top), so really the rules and standards employed can be...
