Welcome to the new BlogCarnivals.com. In the coming weeks this site will help to guide you through the increasingly complicated world of Blog Carnivals. Here’s a bit of what this site is and is not.
What this site isn’t:
This site is not a list of blog carnivals or a place to submit your blog posts to carnivals. There’s already a great site offering that service - The Blog Carnival Index.
What this site will feature:
- Reviews of existing blog carnivals
- News about new carnivals
- My own carnival submissions
- Carnivals I host
- Reader submissions
Why are any of those important?
First, let me say that the reason for the first two isn’t mere vanity on my part. I’ll be attempting to tell you which carnivals I submit to and why. Add that to the reviews of new and existing carnivals and, as a reader or blogger, you’ll be on your way to developing your best blog carnival strategy. Which leads to the question…
Why do you need a blog carnival strategy?
Well, let’s go back a few years to the early days of blogging. When I first started blogging there were perhaps a dozen blog carnivals. All of them were regularly featured on the pages of major metablogs like Glenn Reynolds Instapundit. Posting to almost any carnival assured a nice little bit of exposure for your post and your blog.
The Conservative Cat developed a nice index and a submission form. Back in those days there were perhaps 20 or 30 carnivals, mostly geared to politics with a few geared to things like literature and pets. Still every carnival had a fairly diverse group of contributors, a fairly good set of readers and promised a chance for both groups to get what they wanted.
But things got out of hand with the sheer number of carnivals and the Cat shut down his list, shortly after the Blog Carnival Index came along. The Blog Carnival Index now lists literally hundreds of carnivals in 19 categories. In this Carnival of Babel, many carnivals are nothing more than the carnival hosts using the index to gain links. Some of them aren’t really carnivals at all, just regular posts by the “host.” Readers don’t know whether a particular carnival is worth reading, bloggers don’t know whether to bother submitting to a carnival that may have no readers and the A-List bloggers long ago quit linking to every carnival as it came out.
So that’s where carnival strategy comes in. Fortunately what readers and bloggers want is pretty much the same - carnivals with diverse and interesting links - and I’ll be trying to point everyone in that direction. I’ll try to reduce the noise-to-signal ratio in favor of quality content for bloggers and readers alike.
