Carnival Buzz

The InstaCarnival beta has started, somewhat surreptitiously. Why should you care? If you host blog carnivals, InstaCarnival will save you lots and lots of time.

The InstaCarnival collects all the submissions you receive for a carnival edition and automagically turns them into a blog carnival. Of course, you'll want to spend time editing the pedestrian carnival edition created by InstaCarnival to turn it into a riveting, electrifying read. But you can start editing straight away.

In fact, for the HTML-challenged amongst us, you also will find the InstaCarnival editor which allows you to edit the new carnival edition in plain English.

How do you use the InstaCarnival? If you host blog carnivals, you probably get email from Blog Carnival. About a day before an edition is scheduled, we email you a tickler. In that email, you'll receive a handy link to the InstaCarnival.

As we get feedback on the InstaCarnival and push it through the beta birth canal, we'll make it more generally available.

UPDATE! We've made it much easier to access InstaCarnival.

If you are the carnival organizer, simply log in and select "List my carnivals". If there are any submissions in the queue, you'll see a little number in parenthesis next to the "Add" button on the right. The number tells you how many submissions are queued. Selecting the number will take you to the InstaCarnival page.

If you are an edition host and not the organizer, you still have to wait for the mail. Sorry about that, but we're working on it. For now, edition hosts will have to ask the carnival organizer to cut and paste the InstaCarnival HTML into a mail message to the edition host.