Carnival Buzz

Ken Adams of Carnival of the New Jersey Bloggers has analyzed postings to that carnival. Besides the power law distribution mentioned in the excerpt below, Adams looks at some other, dare we say, link trivia. For instance, most contributors to the Carnival of New Jersey Bloggers blog on Blogger. Sometimes statistics makes the obvious painfully obvious.

A lot has happened in the last six months, so I decided to take a look at all of the previous carnivals. What I found in the link data was pretty interesting. I had expected there to be a core group of pretty regular contributors, and a few not-so-regulars, but that turned out to be wrong. Our little network already follows a power law, just like the blogosphere at large! There are a few folks with a large number of posts, and a very large number (82) with only a single link in the mix.

In case you're wondering about Adams' statistical methodology, he explains it all here.

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Read more from this blogger: SmadaNek: Carnival of the New Jersey Bloggers XXXVII

We're always scouring the web for tips on hosting a blog carnival. This post has links to all five of the excellent and exhaustive posts at Sour Duck on the topic of hosting a blog carnival. Click through for links to the other posts referenced in the excerpt below.

Some others have also written accounts of their hosting different carnivals in the past, including Hedwig The Owl, Science And Sarcasm, Erin Monahan, Coyote Blog, Free Money Finance, Wizbang and me. Let me know if you are aware of other such writings so I can include them here.

If you're considering starting a blog carnival, these posts will show you the ropes, and set your expectations for the time it takes and the pay-off of running a carnival. You can find more about how Blog Carnival helps you manage a carnival by clicking here.

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Read more from this blogger: Science And Politics: On Hosting Blog Carnivals

We've noticed that blog carnivals improve with age and we wondered why that is. Not that you shouldn't read all the great new carnivals showing up at Blog Carnival. If you find a new carnival you like, stick with it! It's likely to get even better.

Why?

The Virtuous Cycle.

The first editions of a blog carnival have a small set of contributors and a small audience. The people whose blog posts have been included usually mention the carnival to their friends who may, in turn, mention it to their friends. Traffic to the new carnival begins.

Some of the friends and friends-of-friends then submit posts to upcoming editions of the carnival. With more submissions, carnival hosts have more material to consider. Over time, carnival hosts may have enough material that they start including just the higher quality submissions, or they start making more focused editions, or they start dividing the editions into focused sections. We see all these things happening in the more established blog carnivals.

Increased submissions leads to higher quality carnival editions which, in turn, leads to more friends telling more friends about the latest edition. Which, in turn, leads to more submissions.

Well, you get the picture. As your new carnival builds a community of interested readers, more bloggers submit posts and the quality of the carnival improves. It's the grass-roots power of community building.

For all those new up-and-coming carnivals, keep up the good work and your community will find you!

Welcome to the first ever New Carnival Showcase, the blog carnival that provides a showcase for new blog carnivals. With one new carnival starting every day, the blogosphere has an abundance of new carnivals to enjoy.

'Tis The Season

First up are the two carnivals who submitted links, the Festival of Frugality, which already has four editions to its credit, and the Carnival of Christmas, the only annual carnival that we know about. Somehow it seems appropriate to feature these two carnivals since those of us who overspent our way through Christmas may need some tips on frugality.

If the first edition is any indication, the Carnival of Christmas is another reason that it's too bad Christmas comes only once a year. Lots of good Christmas stories and humor (our fav is the list of things tinsel, including the Tinsel Triathalon).

For your frugal post-holiday shopping, check out the latest edition of Festival of Frugality. Tips on shopping at malls and pawn shops, not to mention suggestions on how to exercise and reduce monthly bills at the same time!

Different Strokes

Many of the new carnivals provide windows to different communities. I've written about Mars & Venus Go To Shul before. I thought the first edition on JDating covered the great dating issues of our time, like "you don't look like your profile."

Carnival of Beauty features blog posts of Christian women dealing with the mundane and the spritual. The fourth edition includes stories about time management and fence mending.

Carnival of Feminists gives another view on women's lives. The third edition compares feminism in the 1970s with feminism in this decade. And, no, we didn't know that in 1979 some college bookstores refused to sell Our Bodies, Ourselves.

The last carnival in this edition of New Carnival Showcase is the Carnival of Bent Attractions, the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, trans, and queer carnival. Whew, Blog Carnival has turned into quite a melting pot. Its first edition covers an array of topics and ends with a bit about Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser Syndrome. We didn't know what that was. Do you?

End Notes

Thanks for checking out the premiere edition of New Carnival Showcase! Below is the 4-1-1 on the carnival if you'd like to participate in the future.

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.

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!