Carnival Buzz

The mostly undiscovered celbrity Esther Kustanowitz has a funny intro to the new blog carnival she's organizing.

Q: What's a Carnival?

A: Are you serious? You're a blogger and you don't know what a Carnival is? Basically it's a recap/rundown of posts from different blogs on a certain subject or theme.

Of course, Blog Carnival is already falling in love with this new carnival, but we're still open to dating.

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Read more from this blogger: JDaters Anonymous: Mars & Venus Go to Shul: The New Jewish Singles Blog Carnival

I was reading the New Blog Showcase and a light bulb turned on. The world needs a New Carnival Showcase. So, the premiere edition of the New Carnival Showcase will appear the first week of January, 2006. Entries are due no later than the end of December, 2005.

If you've started a new carnival in the past three months, please submit the permalink to your best edition to date to the New Carnival Showcase submission page. Of course, what the New Carnival Showcase really wants is the behind-the-scenes dirt! So, include a few words about what inspired the carnival, who's involved, and the vision of the carnival.

We're looking for hosts for future editions, too. If you're interested, go to the New Carnival Showcase page, click on "Steven" (next to "Maintained by:"), and leave your contact information there.

Submission Guidelines

• The new blog carnival should be no older than three months.
• Submit a permalink to one edition of the new blog carnival.
• Give the name of the new blog carnival.
• Include information about what inspired the carnival, who's participating, and the vision of the carnival.

This recent post looks at the way academics are participating in blogging and blog carnivals, as well as some of the trade-offs between peer-reviewed publishing and carnivals.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a good piece last week by Henry Farrell -- "The Blogosphere As A Carnival of Ideas" -- looking at the small but growing minority of scholars who have become bloggers. Farrell is a poli sci professor at George Washington, and a contributor to the popular group blog Crooked Timber. He argues from experience how blogs have invigorated scholarly exchange within and across fields, allowing for a more relaxed discourse, free of the jargon and stuffy manner of journals. In some cases, blogs have enabled previously obscure academics to break beyond the ivory tower to connect with a large general readership hungry for their insight and expertise.

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Read more from this blogger: if:book: the blog carnival

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.

Our friends at Carnival of the Recipes emailed us about a spam problem:

Carnival of the Recipes #68 was posted this weekend on blogoram.com but our site has been hit with a spam attack and is not functional at the moment. I will contact you again when it is back. Thank you for providing this service.

10000birds.com has been busy writing about the art of hosting a blog carnival. Click through for penultimate installment of the series.

Let's get ready to land this thing! This is my penultimate installment, the tenth in the series, of the never-ending saga of how to host a blog carnival. The complete work to date can be found here.

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Read more from this blogger: 10,000 Birds

Word from our friends at Grand Rounds that Medscape will feature Grand Rounds on their site. Is this the first corporate invovlement with a blog carnival? Let us know the latest about your carnvial!

Medscape will be featuring each week's Grand Rounds host in a column to run on their site, called "Pre Rounds" (in the hospital, pre-rounding is what med students and interns do before formally rounding on patients...) The column will feature the best posts from each host, the story of their blog, some anecdotes, and a link to that week's edition of Grand Rounds.