As far as I’ve been able to confirm, this whole idea of blog carnivals was the September 2002 brainchild of Silflay Hraka, who started the Carnival of the Vanities.
Soon carnivals started to multiply and people started trying to track all the carnivals out there. An early attempt was itself a carnival, Meta-Carnival #1 from Bora Zivkovic’s Science and Politics, which listed over 50 carnivals. The list included several dead carnivals and roughly half a dozen carnivals which had already held over 61 editions at that point.
Leading “metablogger” Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has 53 posts involving blog carnivals at his ProBlogger site, the earliest being this piece titled  “Other Than Search Engines - Where Do You Get New Blog Traffic?”   An indication of how long blog carnivals have been around is Darren’s statement that he didn’t recall who first introduced him to the idea of blog carnivals or when he first wrote about them “as they’ve been around for years.”
Spammers quickly got into the act, using automated programs to take advantage of carnivals much as they take advantage of blog-and-ping systems. The fledgling carnival submission form at Conservative Cat was killed by spammers in September 2006, when it became so severe that it risked “permanent damage to the credibility” of the web server. The Cat suggested the alternative Blog Carnivals Index form, which has since grown to literally hundreds of carnivals.
In early 2006 or late 2005, the Godfather of Blogging Community Building, N.Z. Bear of The Truth Laid Bear, unveiled his ÃœberCarnival, essentially a continuously updated list of the latest carnivals.
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