Carnival Buzz

Will Sun Microsystems start a blog carnival?

Sun employees are prolific bloggers, with Sun President Jonathan Schwartz leading the pack.

If you look around the Sun blogosphere, you'll find a few blog carnivals, too. The first Sun blog carnival, which covered the new ZFS files system, showed up in November last year.

Then two more blog carnivals showed up last month. The Mustang Beta Blog Carnival discusses the beta release of the Java 2 Standard Edition platform. One of the links will take you to Brian Doherty's examination of the term beta in the context of community software development.

The other carnival that showed up last month has the catchy title NetBeans IDE 5.5 Preview Blog Carnival. According to the carnival host, the NetBeans IDE 5.5 Preview will foster "Java EE development for human beings". That is a very hopeful development for the software world in general and the Java world in particular.

What's the big deal? You can see other kinds of blog post aggregations on pages like the Mustang Project Home Page. But we think blog carnivals, while not as timely as, say, the Mustang Home Page, provide more useful and readable blog post aggregation than pages like the Mustang Home Page. You might think of the Mustang Home Page as a sort of Mustang Newspaper, while the Mustang Blog Carnival is more of a Mustang Magazine.

But you'd expect us to think that.

Our real point is this: companies and communities that make products and use blogs may want to consider the benefits of forming blog carnivals for new products. As with other carnivals, product carnivals can not only organize relevant links in a single post, but also help build a community of developers and users around the product.

Ditto for technologies.

And, of course, if you want to make it easy to manage and find all those great new product (and technology) carnivals, feel free to list them at Blog Carnival.