Carnival Buzz

Last year's predictions were about half right. We're a glass is half-full organization.

This year we're refraining from any predictions that could lead to a less than half-full glass.

But here are some of the things in our 2007 plan at Blog Carnival:

• Submission spam. Blog Carnival's submission process prevents most serious spam. We have a few zealous submitters, though, who submit their favorite Christmas cookie recipe to every food carnival, and then to the car carnival, and then to the economics carnival, and then .... We plan to provide some tools for carnival hosts to rate submissions on relevancy for feedback to the carnival community. That should help improve the relevancy of submissions to the carnivals.
• Instacarnivals. The Instacarnival has worked beyond our wildest imagination. Carnival of the Vanities, the grandpa of carnivals, almost went off the air. You'll note the Instacarnival format of the most recent edition. We think we've played a part in keeping great carnivals going, but we want to help improve the quality of each edition. We're working on ways to make it easier for carnival hosts to provide a little more background on posts included in their carnivals, and to make the Instacarnival format a little more flexible.
• Growth. The good news is the growth in the number of blog carnivals. The bad news is it's harder now to find a carnival. Carnivals were supposed to make it easier to find good blog posts. Once you find the right carnival, you can find a lot of good posts. We're working on some different ways to find carnivals. The newsstand is a good working metaphor.
• Widgets. We introduced the Blog Carnival Edition Widget last year. It has got good distribution, but we'd like to encourage more blog carnivals to use it to promote themselves. We're also working on some alternate layouts and applications for widgets.
• Sponsorships. Speaking of widgets, you'll notice that the Blog Carnival Edition Widget has an advertisement at the bottom. We're testing that as a way to generate revenue to defray our costs. It's also an opportunity for blog carnival sponsorships. This is how we think it will work. We'd like to work with blog carnivals to find corporate sponsors for their carnivals. Corporate sponsors can buy the ad space on the widget. Blog Carnival will split the advertising with the sponsored blog carnival. By distributing your carnival widget, you can get the word out about your carnival and get validation from a sponsor. Sponsors will get a very targeted, very dedicated audience that blogs about a topic relevant to the sponsor.

Carnival growth was fantastic in 2006. We're proud to be part of that growth, and the part of the carnival community.

As always, let us know if there are parts of our blog carnival service you'd like improved, or if there are services you need that we're not providing.

Best wishes to all of you and to all the carnivals. May 2007 bring many more great carnivals to the world.

We don't often stray beyond the realm of blog carnivals here at Carnival Buzz. Please indulge us while we stray into the topic of global warming in this post. Don't worry, though, we'll bring it home by the end of the post.

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, spoke at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books last night. We highly recommend her book, which originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine, because it reports on global warming from many perspectives. It tells the story of the Indian village in Alaska that has to move its entire population due to shrinking ice fields. It tells the story of scientists measuring increasing glacial melting and movement. It tells the stories of how different governments around the world are reacting to developments in climate change. (If you live below sea-level in Holland, you think about rising sea levels a lot these days).

Kolbert spoke two days after the 60 Minutes report about the U.S. government's censorship of James Hansen, a leading climatologist who works at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Who censored Hansen? Phil Cooney, the chief-of-staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, made edits to Hansen's work that changed the meaning of the Hansen's report from global warming is happening to something like the jury is out on global warming. Cooney was a former oil industry lobbyist.

So, we got to thinking, if the U.S. government doesn't want to do anything about climate change, well, what can we do? It's an incomprehensible problem in some ways. Climate change is taking place and it's measurable. Carbon dioxide levels have increased from 316 parts per million to 377 parts per million from 1959 to 2004, well above levels measured over the past 400,000 years. The physics of CO2 and the Sun's radiation have been well understood for over 100 years (see this FAQ for lots of the science behind carbon dioxide and warming). The only questions are really 1) how bad will it get? and 2) what can we do?

No one knows the answer to the first question. As Kolbert pointed out last night, there is a tough dynamic between figuring out how to avert a climate catastrophe and planning for a climate catastrophe at the same time. The worst case is oceans rising 300 feet (100 meters) over the coming 100-200 years with substantial human dislocation and political collapse. The best case is something better than that, but believing things won't change is simply wishful thinking.

So, what can we do. We're doing a few things. Besides trying to consume less energy (more walking and bicycling, checking tire pressure, turning off lights, etc.), we added a new Climate Change category to our Hurricane! blog. And, of course, since we think blogs and blog carnivals are a great way to promote good thinking and change, we're hoping that some kind blogger will start a Carnival of Climate Change. Any takers?

After a nice afternoon walk in snowy Prospect Park looking at nearly indiscernable snowmen and listening to shrieks of young girls sledding down hills on flourescent pieces of plastic, we sat down for some web browsing and came across this oldie, but goodie article on blog carnivals by one of our fav bloggers, Bora Zivkovic. This post has one of the more concise definitions of a blog carnival we've read, as well as this swell section on how carnivals function for blogger communities.

Beyond the short-term enjoyment of discovering and reading cool blogs, or getting many hits and new readers, there are three major long-term functions that carnivals can potentially fulfill.

If you're sitting by the fire browsing blogs tonight, and looking for the meaning of life and blog carnivals, give this post a read.

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Read more from this blogger: Science and Politics

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!

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.