Carnival Buzz

Nice post on blog carnivals here.

I’ve submitted a few posts on this blog to blog carnivals and I’ve gotten good responses. It’s good for networking and meeting other bloggers and it’s also good for getting links and traffic. I waited for a while before beginning to submit posts to blog carnivals because I just didn’t know how or where to do it and didn’t take the time to find out. Once, I did I realized how simple it really is and kicked myself for not participating sooner.

Click through for a nice explanation of how to get started.

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Read more from this blogger: 5 Minute How To: Get Started With Blog Carnivals at FreshBlogger

It's a little embarrassing when your viewers explain your service better than you do! Check out this great tutorial on the Blog Carnival widget.

How do you make a submission? It's easy! Look for the widget in the sidebar (you can place it on your blog too!)

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Read more from this blogger: Hummie's World: Fourth Edition of the Blog Carnival

We recently heard a program on National Public Radio featuring the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

We don't claim to have intentions as pure as Thich Nhat Hanh, but some of what he says about communities appealed to us:

What I propose is that you go back to your community and use your talent of listening and of loving speech to help other individuals to improve their quality of listening and talking and learning how to surrender their individualism to the collective insight. Then the quality of life of the group will improve. If you are happy together, harmonious among yourselves, then we can move forward to change society. Peace and social change must begin within your community.

Do Blog Carnival communities have such aspirations?

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Read more from this blogger: An interview with Thich Nhat Hanh -- Community-Based Art and the Practice of Compassion and Mindfulness - Human & Civil Rights / In Motion Magazine

We noticed this at the Carnival of the Celebrities:

Next week's assignment: Posts that are positive about celebrities. Fund-raisers. Visits to hospitals. Iraq USO tours. Submit them through Conservative Cat or Blog Carnival. I prefer the Cat because Yahoo email does not consider it spam!

Two quick tips for blog carnival hosts:

1) If blogcarnival.com email ends up in your spam folder, add the (support at blogcarnival dot com) address to your address book. Yahoo mail, hotmail, and other mail systems will then route blogcarnival mail to your inbox instead of your spam folder. Alternatively, please add us to your Safe List or Approved Sender List.

2) Stop using email to manage submissions!! With the new InstaCarnival feature, you can scoop up all the submissions for a carnival edition off a single webpage! Forget the hassle of cutting and pasting permalinks after you locate and open each submission email. Really, it's much, much faster!

And, of course, we don't really care how you submit to Carnival of the Celebrities, just make sure you submit!

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Read more from this blogger: Don Surber: Carnival of the Celebrities

We ran across an old post in if:book ... well, it was a post from October 2005, which is practically the ice age for blog carnivals. In retrospect, the post was quite insightful:

It's worth paying attention to how these carnivals work because they provide at least part of the answer to a larger concern about the web: how to maintain quality and authority in a flood of amateur self-publishing. In the cycle of the carnival, blogging becomes a kind of open application process where your best work is dangled in the path of roving editors. You might say all bloggers are roving editors, but these ones represent an authoritative collective, one with a self-sustaining focus.

We certainly see increasing quality in carnivals as they mature. And, as we close in on the 250th published blog carnival, it's exciting to see the evolving buzz about blog carnivals, too.

You can see a recent chart of the growth of the blog carnival tag by pressing here. This chart provides good market feedback that blog carnivals are providing a useful service and, as quoted above, helping to maintain quality and authority in a flood of amateur self-publishing.

Some helpful reminders for the reader. If you have an idea for a blog carnival, you can start it by registering here and adding a carnival. If you started a carnival recently, please submit a recent edition to the New Carnival Showcase.

Now, back to some history.

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Read more from this blogger: if:book: October 2005 Archives

Below the Beltway wrote:

Another Monday, and you know what that means......another set of blog carnivals ready for your reading.

We love all the carnivals that come out on Mondays, too!

However, here's a little marketing tip for blog carnival organizers and hosts. With so many great carnivals showing up on Mondays, it's hard to get the attention of your loyal carnival readers, not to mention new readers.

Also, with the Blog Carnival sidebar in places like here, here, and here, you can drive more traffic to your new blog carnival edition if you stay near the top of the sidebar list for a while (the sidebar displays the most recent carnival editions). You also might ask other bloggers to display the sidbar for your carnival to help drive traffic.

So, we're not saying to delay your new carnival edition or anything, but carnivals may want to consider timing new edition releases when they can get the most attention.

.

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Read more from this blogger: Below The Beltway: Carnival Monday

From a list of 10 Helpful Weblog Tips, number 4:

Now I have to admit, Blog Carnival, is a foreign subject to me. So it's better to post a direct quote from Yaro's article; A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers. Do a Google search on Blog Carnivals and fine one that is relevant to your site.

Google is a great resource for finding blog carnivals, but we humbly submit that Blog Carnival might be an even better resource. Especially if you're looking for a page where you can submit your post.

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Read more from this blogger: theladderproject : Gaining More Blog Readers Using 10 Helpful Weblog Tips

LOL.

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Read more from this blogger: Alas, a blog � Blog Archive � How Not To Host A Blog Carnival

Here at Buzz, we spend a lot of time promoting new carnivals. So we thought it'd be refreshing to mosey through neurons less traveled and take a return trip to some good old blog carnivals we may have overlooked recently.

Who's You're Daddy?

Carnival of the Vanities is the daddy of carnivals, the carnival that started them all. It features links to the best recent blog posts (as determined by the bloggers who submit links). If you're a blogger looking to get exposure from a well-edited, high-traffic carnival, try submitting a recent post to CotV. The most recent edition, Edition 179 (yes, 179 editions!!), starts with some great Editor's Picks followed by links to blog posts in categories like Economy and Finance, Blogging, Culture, and How-to. Being the information sharers that we are, our fav link was to Wayne Hurlbert's post on Information sharing: Help others succeed.

Is There Doctor In The Blogosphere?

Like the most recent edition of the CotV, the most recent edition of Grand Rounds starts with 10 featured blog posts about medicine followed by links to blog posts in categories like Patient's Perspective and Commentary. Hmmm, is there a universal carnival format emerging? We like reading editor's picks at the top of a carnival, especially when we don't have time to click through every last link in a carnival (and who doesn't feel a little guilty about possibly missing a great nugget of information when they don't click on every link in a carnival?) (or are we the only obsessive-compulsives here in the blogosphere?).

Speaking of sharing information, the post on building centralized pharmaceutical histories for patients seems simultaneously wonderful and creepy. It's nice to know that any pharmacist could flag a bad drug interaction for any patient. However, given that Walmart and Office Max can't seem to hold on to mere credit information, imagine what would happen if the world were to find out what drugs we use to write these blogs?

Next Stop, New Jersey

In case you were concerned that a universal carnival format had emerged, take a gander at the most recent edition of the Carnival of the New Jersey Bloggers. Other geographies have carnivals (Wisconsin, Virginia, North Caroline, India, England, the Balkans, etc.) (if you're from a carnival-challenged geography, please register and start one!), but it's hard to beat the the Garden State bloggers for, well, being New Jersians.

In other words, this carnival is off the wall.

Not that we pretend to understand anything New Jersey. The post about Two Guys is about as parochial as we can imagine. We don't understand Two Guys like New Jersians don't understand Gemellos, the place to go for wine if you grew up near Stanford in California.

Speaking of which, it's time for a glass of Syrah and a little cheese while we digest a few more carnivals.

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

10000birds.com has been busy writing about the art of hosting a blog carnival. Click through for penultimate installment of the series.

Let's get ready to land this thing! This is my penultimate installment, the tenth in the series, of the never-ending saga of how to host a blog carnival. The complete work to date can be found here.

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Read more from this blogger: 10,000 Birds