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.

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

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!

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

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

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.

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!

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?

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

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.

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!

Read more: 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.

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 practically breathe permalinks at Blog Carnival. When we started, we got so many questions about permalinks that we wrote our own permalink explanation.

Understanding permalinks is like learning to ride a bike. Before you get it, it's kind of scary. Once you get it, it makes life easy.

Sometimes we forget that without permalinks, blogs would be nearly impossible and certainly of much less value. If there were a Nobel Prize for blogging, the inventor of the permalink would win every year.

Permalinks let Blog Carnival point to a specific post regardless of where it is in your stream of blog posts. People who read your carnival, for instance, usually want the link to the post with the carnival, not the link to your blog's homepage. A carnival, in turn, points to relevant posts rather than blog homepages.

Here is an illustration. This is the permalink for this post. This, on the other hand, is the link to this blog's homepage. If you click on this post's permalink, you will always get this post. If you click on this blog's homepage, you will find this post until it scrolls off the bottom of the homepage.

Blog Carnival's primary value is helping you find the right permalinks.

So please, dear reader, don't get mad or frustrated when we insist that you input a permalink rather than just any old URL. Permalinks are like oxygen to us.

The Blog Carnival Marketing Department has been busy at work.

The important news?

The Blog Carnival Widget will now be known as the Blog Carnival Edition Widget.

Earthshattering.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, click here for a sample Widget.

The best things is to put this fab new Widget on your own blog or webpage. Why? Well, you'll have all the 4-1-1 on your favorite Carnival right at your own blog.

Go to the link above, select your favorite Carnival, scroll down to the bottom, and click where it says "put this widget on your blog". From there, it's self-explanatory. And it's easy to make it the right size and color for your blog.

Oh, and you can relax. The Marketing Department is out for the holidays. Too much stress or something.

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!

Read more: 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!

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.

Read more: How to Make Money From Your Blog