Carnival Buzz

We added the 150th blog carnival to our index this week. At the current rate of new carnivals being added to the Blog Carnival index, we'll double that in a year or so.

But we'd really like to see three, four or five times more carnivals in a year. Even with 150 carnivals, there are lots of topic areas ripe for "carnivalization". Teachers, health care providers, and legal experts have made quite an impression in the carnival world so far. We've had a start in marketing carnivas, and may have a not-for-profit carnival soon. What about law enforcement and public service? Or, engineering? Or, military (no secrets, of course, wink wink nudge nudge)? The list of under-represented professionals in the carnival world goes on and on.

Since blog carnivals are useful community information-sharing microcosms in the sea of the blogosphere, we're also hoping for some new forms of carnivals that create value for specific communities. For instance, we've read some suggestions for peer-review (or near-peer-review) blog carnivals where scientists share information with their peers prior to publication. Another possible area for carnivals is market research with informed bloggers.

Then there are carnivals that create completely new kinds of community activities like Blogging by Mail, a food carnival whose participants mail each other ingredients and then blog about what they do with those ingredients they receive from other carnival participants. How about a carnival of photo scavenger hunts? Or, audio scavenger hunts? Okay, video scavenger hunts (for the more technologically adept)? Or a carnival of question and answers that invites its participants to answer a list of questions each week? The blog carnival format lends itself to a lot of creative new forms of community activity!

At Blog Carnival, we're putting our efforts into making it easy to run a carnival so that you'll have no excuse not to start the carnival that's been brewing in your mind! (Speaking of which, where is the coffee carnival, anyway?) Our new year's resolution is to help carnivalization take off in 2006. And, as always, we love hearing from you about what would make Blog Carnival work better for you.