Carnival Buzz

The Engineering Department has come up with a great new search tool! Now, when you search in the search bar at the top of the Blog Carnival Home Page, we'll search through:

• past blog carnival editions
• blog posts that have been submitted to Blog Carnival and accepted by a carnival host
• blog posts in Blog Carnival's blogs

We don't search anywhere else on the web! That means that our search provides very high quality results. Since all the submissions have been vetted by carnival hosts, you're searching through a very valuable hand crafted distillation of the blogosphere.

When we write "we search through", we really mean "Blog Carnival and Google search through". That's important because it takes some time for Google to index new editions and recently submitted (and accepted) posts. So, don't expect to see your new edition or recent submission in the Blog Carnival search results right away.

Why do we think this is so cool? Well, if you read something in a blog carnival, you have a senior moment, and you can't remember where you read it, now it's really easy to find again. Just go to the Blog Carnival search bar.

It's also like the old days when magazines had an index of articles every year. Except this is much better than those old magazine indexes since you don't have to wait until the end of the year to find something.

If you want the Blog Carnival search service to include your blog post in its results, we need to know about it! Make sure that you've put all your blog carnival editions in the Blog Carnival Index. If you're submitting one of your blog posts to a carnival host, you must submit it through Blog Carnival for us to include it.

Enjoy!

Congratulations to Blawg Review for it's 100th Edition! Here's an excerpt from the edition that we think tells the story of Blawg Review's longevity and popularity.

One thing you might notice about Blawg Review that is a bit different from other blog carnivals is that we put the emphasis on the hosts. Here, the hosts are responsible for selecting the best law blog posts from the previous week, including only what the host considers the best blog posts from several contributors each week. Regular contributors often recommend posts by other bloggers that would be good to include in the next week's presentation. Think of Blawg Review as a "peer-reviewed" blog carnival.

In honor of all the past hosts, the 100th edition gives a quick guided tour through all 99 previous editions. Whew! What a nice walk down memory lane. Enjoy!

We've had great response to our new Featured Carnival feature.

To make it even easier to expand your horizons with one great new carnival everyday, we've made an RSS feed of the Featured Carnivals. You can find it on this page or, with convenient one click set-up for your RSS reader here

Enjoy!

In case you haven't noticed yet, Blog Carnival changed its homepage this weekend. We've added something the Marketing Department, in its characteristically apothegmatic way, calls Today's Featured Carnival.

Why, you might ask, did we make this change?

There's never a single reason. One inspiration may have been the 47th Edition of The History Carnival. Amazingly, this edition is written in the form of a U.S. Senate debate.

Now, we know enough about the English language to know that the adjective for a piece of writing in the form of a letter is epistolatory. But what is the adjective for a piece writing in the form of a Senate debate? Sentorian?

As we debated that, we began to realize that in the hundreds of blog carnivals and in the thousands of editions, there was something worth recognizing. Maybe we were suffering PGGSS (post-Golden-Globe-Stress-Syndrome) without knowing it, or maybe it was the Oscar buzz in the air. Who knows? But in an instant, we put aside our differences and realized we needed some kind of an award for those blog carnivals that are, if you'll excuse the expression, out of this blogosphere.

We decided immediately we had to redesign the homepage, to don our tuxedos and evening gowns, and to begin recognizing the great work going on in the blog carnival communities.

So, each and every day, we will open the envelope and present Today's Featured Carnival. We hope you win! If you don't, we hope you'll at least appreciate the carnival of the day as much as we do.

Ever wondered what happens to traffic on your blog when you host a blog carnival?

Hmmm.... can you guess which day I hosted the Bestest Blog Animal Carnival?

Total hits for Saturday the 13th: 546, a new record here at It's A Blog Eat Blog World

If you're interested in carnivals, a good way to get started is by hosting an edition of an existing carnival. You'll learn how carnivals work, meet new and interesting bloggers, and get more traffic coming to your blog.

It's easy!

First, find a carnival on the Blog Carnival list of carnivals. Click on the name of a carnival you want to host.

If you clicked on, say, yarnival because you love knitting, you'd go to the yarnival carnival page hosted by Blog Carnival.

Finally, click on the name next to the words "Maintained by:". You can send a message to the carnival organizer letting them know you want to host an upcoming edition.

Of course, you can always start a carnival right away. But you might want to see if someone else has a similar carnival concept to yours and join forces. Here at Blog Carnival, we've noticed that the carnivals that enlist more hosts tend to last longer and attract a larger audience.

Have fun!

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Read more from this blogger: It's A Blog Eat Blog World: Carnival Stats

Last week we went a little crazy and added about 40 stores to Blog Carnival. As you may know, we maintain a number of blogs on topics like phones, food, and gifts.

The Marketing Department decided each blog should have its own store, with a set of products that would be useful for each blog's audience. The Engineering Department approved the idea and, well, we took a (virtual) trip to Amazon to figure out how to build stores.

Build stores we did! Some of our favorite stores are The Travel Store, The Recipe Store, and The Cartoon Store. You can find links to our shiny new stores at the top of the left column of each of Blog Carnival's blogs.

Why are we telling you this story?

We think carnival organizers might want to consider providing stores for their audiences. Stores based on carnival topics are convenient for your audience, and can generate some cash for your carnival.

For more information, we recommend a (virtual) trip to Amazon.

We've never had one of our own even mentioned for an award, but Blog Carnival's Travel Blog got 10th place in this rating of travel blogs.

For whatever reason, Travel Blogs have been slow to take off in the UK, compared to our friends, in the United States. That is changing though, and it’s been a tough decision to choose my top travel blogs for 2006, with over 40 RSS feeds on my reader.

Here’s my favourite travel blogs for 2006

10. Blog Carnival

Click through below for 9 through 1. We couldn't even dream of being as good as some of these!

If you have a post you'd like us to include in Travel Blog, submit it here!

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Read more from this blogger: Travel Blogging all over the World | Travel Rants Blog

Here's great news for managing and promoting your blog carnival: the new Blog Carnival Widget!!!.

What is it? Where do you get one?

You can see the carnival widget if you browse all the carnival and select any one. Click here, for instance, to see Blog Carnival's listing for Carnival of the Capitalists.

Those of you paying attention will notice a new widget that gives you quick access to important carnival links like the current edition, the submissions page, and the carnival home page. You'll find tabs taking you to links to all past and scheduled carnival editions, too.

Too cool for school? We think not!

Why? Because you can put this widget on your blog, and you can tell all your friends to put this widget on their blogs (or websites).

Too cool for school, yet?

Maybe. But check this out. Here's the widget page for Carnival of the Capitalists. Notice that you can "dial in" how wide you want the widget for your blog. Try putting a number in the "Width" box and pressing return. Presto change-o, you have a widget that fits your blog's (or website's) layout.

We're pretty sure the Blog Carnival Widget is too cool for school. We're hoping you'll tell us ways to make it even cooler!

Have fun playing with your new widgets!

From a long, long blog post entitled How to Make Money From Your Blog, this paragraph:

Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know). Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche. Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free. Submitting only takes minutes if you use a multi-carnvival submission form. Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.

Lots more here on how blog carnivals helped this blogger increase traffic, as well as other tips on building a successful blog.

In the long run, blog carnivals are a great way to build community, too. Don't stop submitting after your blog has become a runaway success.

Like blogs, carnivals take time to build audience and traffic, too. Make sure to take advantage of some of the traffic building tips in the article to help with your carnival, too.

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Read more from this blogger: How to Make Money From Your Blog

Not to toot our horn too much or anything, but Frank Sennet wrote this flattering article on Blog Carnival in the Spokesman-Review, the newspaper of reference for Spokane, Washington, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, and the Inland Northwest.

Frank, who makes "sense of the blog world so you don't have to", also provided some handy links to go along with the article.

We're glad that the reporter who can make sense of the blog world likes Blog Carnival. Thanks Frank!

Here's a question that showed up in our mail box today:

Just wondered if you had a way of seeing which carnival had the longest scheduled set of hosts...Carnival of the Green is now booking into 2007!!! Is anyone booked up further than that in advance?

With a little help from the database guru, we found out that quite a few blog carnivals have scheduled editions way out there:

• Carnival of Christmas
• Carnival of Personal Finance
• Carnival of Bent Attractions
• Carnival of the Green
• Carnival of the Godless
• Does My Blog Look Good in This?
• Skeptics Circle
• Carnival of Feminists
• The Big Fat Carnival

With the new InstaCarnival function (see this recent post), it's a good idea to keep at least one future edition scheduled ... even if you change the schedule.

Why? Well, currently the great new InstaCarnival feature only shows you all the submissions for the next scheduled edition when there actually is a next edition scheduled.

We asked the database guru why. He said that, like gravity, it's just the way the world works right now.

So, thanks for the question. Feel free to send in other questions and we'll check with the database guru for further insights into the world of blog carnivals.

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.

Derek has posted the next fine edition of the New Carnival Showcase. It's a great read!

One thing we love about the blogosphere is that you can reach out and email someone when you see a blog you really like. So we decided to email N.Z. Bear at The Truth Laid Bear. He's been doing a lot of great work at TTLB to make it easy to find the blog content you want.

Email led to phone conversations led to an actual face-to-face meeting last week. Then, as N.Z. posted earlier today:

I'm pleased to announce that TTLB is now partnering with BlogCarnival.com to bring the very latest & greatest blog carnivals to the TTLB ÜberCarnival page.

We're super-pleased to be supporting TTLB, too!

What we can't believe is that N.Z. has time to work on TTLB and Pork Busters. We're hoping that providing support to the TTLB ÜberCarnival will give N.Z. a little time now to sleep.

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Read more from this blogger: The Truth Laid Bear: ttlb and blogcarnival.com

We ran across a blog carnival related post on the SNOG! bulletin board. A bulletin board member is discussing the idea of starting a SNOG! carnival (which, of course, we think it a terrific idea).

I don't think it'd really take a lot of effort. I'm not counting on a huge mass of people contributing, this is sort of a test run, if you will. And I'm not asking for a 5000-word post; just a post on your blog about the topic o' the week, with something hopefully related to this message board tossed in for good measure.

If this takes off this could be really cool since it'd not only generate more publicity for SNOG! but it'd also give us to chance to get to know one another through our blogs.

Two things struck us. One is that even a community bulletin board can benefit from the community building that happens with blog carnivals. The other is that blog carnivals need to be easy for contributors and hosts.

Speaking of easy, we're alpha testing some new tools to make carnivals really easy to write. One of the tedious things about writing carnival editions is simply cutting and pasting all the submissions information into the edition text.

The Blog Carnival engineering staff is hunkering down, and we're excited by the first glimpses of the new InstaCarnival demos we've seen. Carnival hosts still will have to do a little writing, of course, but we've been able to generate a new carnival edition with the push of a button! With another 15-30 minutes or so additional effort in Blog Carnival's lab testing facilities, we've generated really well edited carnival editions.

So, now you have two things to look forward to. The new SNOG! carnival and the new InstaCarnival feature here at Blog Carnival. Stay tuned!

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Read more from this blogger: SNOG! - Powered by XMB 1.9.1 Nexus

Welcome to the third edition of New Carnival Showcase. Many stimulating new carnivals were launched in the past month and many of those carnivals submitted to New Carnival Showcase. In honor of tonight's Academy Awards, I'm calling this the gold statue edition. We'll inform today's featured carnivals at which fabu Oscar party they can pick up their statue as soon as we find out which party we're going to. And make the statues.

In no particular order, the envelopes, please.

Ars Gratia Artis

Two new carnivals are reporting on the creative world. First up, Carnival of the Creators organized by Derek Andrews at Seafoam Woodturning. Canadian Andrews writes:

I first came across blog carnivals over a year ago, but it was only recently that I saw the benefits (see post). As a craftsperson who likes to explore new ways to promote both my own work and that of others, I realised that a carnival aboot creative people would be a great idea.

Great idea, indeed. The first edition features, among other creative endeavors, the Storyblogging Carnival. Carnivals covering carnivals is a concept we understand! Andrews has linked to posts on many other creative activities including jewelry and clothing, as well as the business of art.

Speaking of Storyblogging, the other new carnival in the creative category is the Carnival of Children's Literature. Melissa Wiley, at Here in the Bonny Glen, presents the First Carnival of Children's Literature:

This is the first Carnival of Children's Literature, a collection of posts by authors, book reviewers, librarians, and parents about all sorts of children's books.

Of all the carnivals we review in this third edition of New Carnival Showcase, this carnival wins the award for most comprehensive. There really are links to almost anything you can think of, even a link to someone who (horrible dictu!) doesn't like Harry Potter.

Entres Nous

Kelby Carr, at About France for Visitors, has started the Carnival of France, Travel and Francophiles, a romantic carnival to be sure. The debut edition includes many links Français. With Oscars only hours away, the link Français that caught our eye was about the new Bond girl Français (okay, it wasn't just the Oscar thing that made this link such a stand out). The foodies in the audience will enjoy the food and wine links Français, too.

Blog On

The bloggers in the audience will appreciate Carnival of Blog Coverage. Organizer and writer Danny Glover explains:

I started writing the Carnival of Blog Coverage because I love blogs and want to read everything about them. I figured there are plenty of other folks like me, and my aim is to give them their blog fixes, too. I will periodically post carnival entries on the latest blog stories. Most of the time, I'll probably just link to the stories; other times, I'll summarize them or add my commentary on the substance of the stories.

We hope the first edition — The Fall Of Blogs? — has many future editions following. Besides links to a veritable who's who of the blogerati, you'll find this link about blargon.

Old Enough to Vote?

The youngest carnival organizer that we know if is Kevin W at The Liberal Wrong - Wing. We don't know whether Kevin is old enough to vote, but he's certainly old enough to have a political voice. Kevin has started Carnival of Liberal's Wrongs, which he explains to us:

This is a political blog, with an author who lives in liberal Massachusetts and seeks to undermine liberal arguments in almost anything political. The Carnival hosts the posts of other blogs which feel similarly as does The Liberal Wrong Wing - that liberals are almost always and consistently wrong.

The Carnival of Liberal's Wrongs #4 has a terse, straight-ahead style. 25% of the links in this edition are about Jimmy Carter. We don't know if that's significant.

What Kind of Genes Are Those?

We're hoping for a lot more blog carnivals like the Carnival of Biotechnology. Yali Friedman writes to us that:

I've been blogging on biotech for six years now. When I started, there was only one biotech blog - now there's a variety of sites doing a great job of covering a whole bunch of specialties. I started the Carnival of Biotechnology to collect all the insight that's being generated on all these sites.

While we like all the political, arts, food, history, and education carnivals, we think scientists and technologists may be somewhat carnival-challenged. The Inaugural Carnival of Biotechnology is short, but shows promise. Please, please keep new editions coming!

Coming to a Carnival Near You Soon

Thanks for checking out the third edition of New Carnival Showcase! Derek Andrews has graciously volunteered host the 4th edition of New Carnival Showcase at Creators Carnival next month. Submissions through Blog Carnival will be emailed to Derek.

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.

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.

One of us lived in a house that was built by Joe Youngerman, an early president of the Directors Guild of America (you can read more about Youngerman and early Hollywood in the excellent book My Seventy Years at Paramount Studios and the Directors Guild of America). One perk of living there was that the studios hadn't figured out that the Youngermans had moved on to greener pastures, so the studios kept sending DVDs of all the films nominated for an Academy Award as part of their campaign to win more statues.

A DVD sent out for the purpose of garnering votes from Academy members always arrived with a notice saying that the DVD was for your consideration.

Even though none of us lives in Hollywod anymore and we no longer receive those free promotional DVDs, Blog Carnival is pleased to present, in the spirit of Joe Youngerman and for your consideration, Carnival of the Celebrities' Brokeback Mountain Extravaganza.

You'll want to check this before you attend your swank 78th Academy Award parties on March 5th. Otherwise, what will you have to talk about?

It wasn't so long ago that we celebrated the milestone of 150 blog carnivals.

This past week the Blog Carnival Index reached 200! Thanks to all the bloggers who have taken the initiative to start a carnival. We look forward to many more.

In our previous milestone post, we'd suggested that someone start a carnival about coffee. Well, that happened. We're still waiting for someone to start the photo scavenger hunt carnival.

If you've thought about starting a carnival, you'll find tons of good resources here and all over the blogosphere. Join in!

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

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 mostly undiscovered celbrity Esther Kustanowitz has a funny intro to the new blog carnival she's organizing.

Q: What's a Carnival?

A: Are you serious? You're a blogger and you don't know what a Carnival is? Basically it's a recap/rundown of posts from different blogs on a certain subject or theme.

Of course, Blog Carnival is already falling in love with this new carnival, but we're still open to dating.

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Read more from this blogger: JDaters Anonymous: Mars & Venus Go to Shul: The New Jewish Singles Blog Carnival

I was reading the New Blog Showcase and a light bulb turned on. The world needs a New Carnival Showcase. So, the premiere edition of the New Carnival Showcase will appear the first week of January, 2006. Entries are due no later than the end of December, 2005.

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.

Our friends at Carnival of the Recipes emailed us about a spam problem:

Carnival of the Recipes #68 was posted this weekend on blogoram.com but our site has been hit with a spam attack and is not functional at the moment. I will contact you again when it is back. Thank you for providing this service.

Word from our friends at Grand Rounds that Medscape will feature Grand Rounds on their site. Is this the first corporate invovlement with a blog carnival? Let us know the latest about your carnvial!

Medscape will be featuring each week's Grand Rounds host in a column to run on their site, called "Pre Rounds" (in the hospital, pre-rounding is what med students and interns do before formally rounding on patients...) The column will feature the best posts from each host, the story of their blog, some anecdotes, and a link to that week's edition of Grand Rounds.

Some carnivals publish weekly, some publish monthly, and some publish whenever the organizer feels like it. But we've never seen an annual carnival before. Until now. Congratulations to Adam for putting out a call for submissions to the first annual Carnival of Christmas.