Friday, April 15, 2005
Carnival Thoughts
There’s a mailing list for Carnival of the vanities, used normally for announcements that it is up and announcements of where to send entries for the next edition. On it I saw mention that Instapundit had stopped linking Carnival of the Capitalists for a few months at one point. Not so. He seems, if anything, to be linking more freely to carnival-like memes than ever, almost to the point of eliminating the need for any of the many carnival of the carnivals types of blogs or roundups at the rate things are going. Anyway, I replied to the list to address that, and ended up putting forth my thoughts on the large carnivals more generally. The text follows, with links added:
To his credit, Glenn has only actually missed about four Carnival of the Capitalists since it started in October 2003. I managed that by making him the first person to know about the idea after Rob at BusinessPundit and me, in the form of a third party sanity check to see if the idea made sense. He liked it, said let him know when it was up and he’d link it. He missed a couple times around holidays and once or twice when he was preoccupied with other big news or was away. One week, for instance, CotC got posted a little later than normal and missed getting to him before he left things in the hands of guest posters, who utterly ignored me. Most weeks he links it within minutes of my sending him the link; it’s something he looks for on Sunday night or Monday.
The Carnival of the Vanities controversy struck me funny because I had been thinking last week that at least CotV seems to go smoothly, compared to the recent CotC controversies. They are similar in size now, so the problems are similar. That is, large number of entries, making hosting a lot of work, and making it certain readers won’t go to every linked post, or may not even scroll through and give every linked post description a chance to entice them. Which means the layout and descriptions need to be all the better, which is all the more work.
I’d say they differ in that CotV is clearly intended to be all-inclusive. In theory it’s the entrant’s self-selected “best post” of the past week, or a post in which they take pride, but who’s checking? And do we really want to go all editorial on them? Nor does CotV limit the type of entry. CotC is strictly supposed to be business and economics. That’s a huge range, but still limited. It drives me absolutely nuts when I see people who should know better listing what is considered “on-topic” for CotC and including “politics.” It worries me that it’s become so common to include entries that are on the topic of blogging, just because we got in the habit because sometimes entries on blogging are on blogging for business.
When we came up with CotC, it was partly on the idea of showcasing good stuff, partly on the idea of getting attention for blogs nobody might have heard of, and partly on the idea of getting attention for business blogging from mainstream readers and even mainstream business press.
Where will it go from here? Not completely sure, but it’s clear that hosts need to understand the commitment, and that readability and navigability are everything. For CotC, I think we need to continue to emphasize inclusiveness, while emphasizing what is on-topic and the host’s job of enforcing that, and while encouraging hosts to exercise qualitative editorial control without going rogue.
