Tuesday, August 23, 2005
For Useful Carnival Knowledge
Free Money Finance has an interesting analysis regarding blog carnival hosting and participation, with suggestions for how hosts and entrants can optimize the experience. It’s a relatively long post, but you’ll probably find it worth your time if you are interested in such things.
I had never realized that Monday was such a boost to carnival traffic. Carnival of the Capitalists was one of the first such things after the original Carnival of the Vanities, and we chose Monday for a few reasons unrelated to expectations about traffic.
First, it wouldn’t conflict with Wednesday, which was CotV’s day. Now there are so many carnivals that several might occur the same day of the week. Of course, “Monday” was only to be the official “edition” date, and the CotC could actually be online during the weekend. The wider window we originally envisioned has narrowed to no earlier than late Sunday afternoon, and usually late Sunday night or relatively early Monday morning.
Second, it corresponded with the business week, essentially arming the reader at the start of the week with a “magazine” of business and economic “articles” from the week just ended.
Third, it gave the host the weekend to do the bulk of the work involved. Which is good, as the thing has grown to significant size. I didn’t count how many made it into the lastest CotC, but the more than sixty e-mails received for the 8/22/05 edition is a record turnout.
I have no idea why other carnivals chose one day rather than another, but that’s what we were thinking almost two years ago.