Carnival Buzz

Nice post on blog carnivals here.

I’ve submitted a few posts on this blog to blog carnivals and I’ve gotten good responses. It’s good for networking and meeting other bloggers and it’s also good for getting links and traffic. I waited for a while before beginning to submit posts to blog carnivals because I just didn’t know how or where to do it and didn’t take the time to find out. Once, I did I realized how simple it really is and kicked myself for not participating sooner.

Click through for a nice explanation of how to get started.

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Read more from this blogger: 5 Minute How To: Get Started With Blog Carnivals at FreshBlogger

The Engineering Department has come up with a great new search tool! Now, when you search in the search bar at the top of the Blog Carnival Home Page, we'll search through:

• past blog carnival editions
• blog posts that have been submitted to Blog Carnival and accepted by a carnival host
• blog posts in Blog Carnival's blogs

We don't search anywhere else on the web! That means that our search provides very high quality results. Since all the submissions have been vetted by carnival hosts, you're searching through a very valuable hand crafted distillation of the blogosphere.

When we write "we search through", we really mean "Blog Carnival and Google search through". That's important because it takes some time for Google to index new editions and recently submitted (and accepted) posts. So, don't expect to see your new edition or recent submission in the Blog Carnival search results right away.

Why do we think this is so cool? Well, if you read something in a blog carnival, you have a senior moment, and you can't remember where you read it, now it's really easy to find again. Just go to the Blog Carnival search bar.

It's also like the old days when magazines had an index of articles every year. Except this is much better than those old magazine indexes since you don't have to wait until the end of the year to find something.

If you want the Blog Carnival search service to include your blog post in its results, we need to know about it! Make sure that you've put all your blog carnival editions in the Blog Carnival Index. If you're submitting one of your blog posts to a carnival host, you must submit it through Blog Carnival for us to include it.

Enjoy!

It's a little embarrassing when your viewers explain your service better than you do! Check out this great tutorial on the Blog Carnival widget.

How do you make a submission? It's easy! Look for the widget in the sidebar (you can place it on your blog too!)

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Read more from this blogger: Hummie's World: Fourth Edition of the Blog Carnival

Congratulations to Blawg Review for it's 100th Edition! Here's an excerpt from the edition that we think tells the story of Blawg Review's longevity and popularity.

One thing you might notice about Blawg Review that is a bit different from other blog carnivals is that we put the emphasis on the hosts. Here, the hosts are responsible for selecting the best law blog posts from the previous week, including only what the host considers the best blog posts from several contributors each week. Regular contributors often recommend posts by other bloggers that would be good to include in the next week's presentation. Think of Blawg Review as a "peer-reviewed" blog carnival.

In honor of all the past hosts, the 100th edition gives a quick guided tour through all 99 previous editions. Whew! What a nice walk down memory lane. Enjoy!

We've had great response to our new Featured Carnival feature.

To make it even easier to expand your horizons with one great new carnival everyday, we've made an RSS feed of the Featured Carnivals. You can find it on this page or, with convenient one click set-up for your RSS reader here

Enjoy!

We recently heard a program on National Public Radio featuring the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

We don't claim to have intentions as pure as Thich Nhat Hanh, but some of what he says about communities appealed to us:

What I propose is that you go back to your community and use your talent of listening and of loving speech to help other individuals to improve their quality of listening and talking and learning how to surrender their individualism to the collective insight. Then the quality of life of the group will improve. If you are happy together, harmonious among yourselves, then we can move forward to change society. Peace and social change must begin within your community.

Do Blog Carnival communities have such aspirations?

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Read more from this blogger: An interview with Thich Nhat Hanh -- Community-Based Art and the Practice of Compassion and Mindfulness - Human & Civil Rights / In Motion Magazine

In case you haven't noticed yet, Blog Carnival changed its homepage this weekend. We've added something the Marketing Department, in its characteristically apothegmatic way, calls Today's Featured Carnival.

Why, you might ask, did we make this change?

There's never a single reason. One inspiration may have been the 47th Edition of The History Carnival. Amazingly, this edition is written in the form of a U.S. Senate debate.

Now, we know enough about the English language to know that the adjective for a piece of writing in the form of a letter is epistolatory. But what is the adjective for a piece writing in the form of a Senate debate? Sentorian?

As we debated that, we began to realize that in the hundreds of blog carnivals and in the thousands of editions, there was something worth recognizing. Maybe we were suffering PGGSS (post-Golden-Globe-Stress-Syndrome) without knowing it, or maybe it was the Oscar buzz in the air. Who knows? But in an instant, we put aside our differences and realized we needed some kind of an award for those blog carnivals that are, if you'll excuse the expression, out of this blogosphere.

We decided immediately we had to redesign the homepage, to don our tuxedos and evening gowns, and to begin recognizing the great work going on in the blog carnival communities.

So, each and every day, we will open the envelope and present Today's Featured Carnival. We hope you win! If you don't, we hope you'll at least appreciate the carnival of the day as much as we do.