Carnival Buzz

The blogosphere has been set to prediction mode today, so we'll join in the fun.

• Blog Carnival Adds New Features. Not a difficult prediction since we've seen some of the prototypes in development over in the Blog Carnival Engineering Department. Early in 2006, carnival hosts can expect some services to make it easier to turn submissions into carnival editions and to communicate with other members of their carnival team and audience. 'Nuf said.
• Google Figures Out The Term Blog Carnival. We're a little tired of the Google advertisements for trips on large luxury liners showing up on our pages. (If we write the name of the actual advertiser, it will attract even more of those ads). So, if you're looking for a boat trip, we suggest looking on other web sites. Your indication that Google's machinery has figured out that blog carnivals have more to do with magazines than vacations comes when Google runs ads on which you'd really like to click.
• Blog Carnivals Go Mobile. Okay, we're not actually sure anything like this makes sense yet, but we liked this article about using RSS and IM to create a mobile phone interface to the Internet. Blog Carnival already does the RSS bit. (Take a look, for instance, here for the RSS feed to all the editions of Bonfire of the Vanities). Maybe you'll do the IM bit and show us a cool mobile interface to Blog Carnival?
• Blog Carnivals Touted As Magazines of the Future. Again, not a difficult prediction since we've read this on a few blog posts. Nevertheless, we predict that 2006 is the year that Main Stream Media starts noticing blog carnivals.
• Blog Carnivals Go World Wide. We've seen blog carnivals from Canada and England for a some time. Now we're seeing blog carnivals from everywhere. For instance, you can see blog carnivals from Peru, Australia, New Zealand, Malta, the Balkans, France, and Germany. We can understand most of these with online translators, but we haven't found a good translator for Australian yet.
• The Underpants Gnomes Problem Goes Away. If you need help with a reference on this, click here. We don't really want to say much more than this: 1) all the incentives are for business plans that generate money and 2) this looks kind of like the magazine business.
• Handsets Break Free From Carriers. It would be boring if we didn't make a couple of predictions outside our realm of knowledge. All we know about cell phones is that there are lots of cool cell phones and it seems strange that you have to sign a two year contract with a cell phone carrier to get one. After all, if you already pay $500 for a digital camera, why wouldn't you pay $500 for a digital camera that also had an MP3 player, video player, FM radio, personal organizer, Internet connection, and (oh, yeah) a cell phone? Then you can buy the connection time you need without a two-year lock up. Are we missing something here?
• Darwin Award Nominee. Here's our other off topic prediction. We get to read a lot of blogs at Blog Carnival. With Intelligent Design in the news, we thought it was appropriate to make our nomination to the Darwin Awards. Our nomination goes to the poor Qwest executive (R.I.P.) who hid in the bushes and made turkey sounds during turkey hunting season. With all due respect, we're nominating him for the 2005 Darwin Awards.

We'll check back in with you next year around this time to see how we did. In the meantime, if you couldn't think of any resolutions of your own, here one: think of a topic you enjoy and start a blog carnival in 2006! Happy New Year!