Good Blog Carnivals

Duane Smith wrote an interesting Carnival Post-mortem a while back in which he talked about what he thought made for a good blog carnival. I think it’s a very helpful piece. There’s only two things I would add to it. One is that when I host a blog carnival I also search on Sphere and Technorati for blog posts on recent news stories. I use both because the two engines have different strengths and weaknesses.

The other is don’t offer to host a carnival if you have no interest in what other bloggers are saying about the topic. It’s a particularly bad idea because I’d guess a large number of readers of blog carnivals are other bloggers so you reveal your contempt for readers and people who’d link to you in one go.

Duane’s comments are specifically about hosting the Biblical Studies Carnival, but I’d say they hold for any topic.

The reason I’ve held off commenting on it till now is that it’s hard to find a time when you can highlight things carnival hosts may have missed without sounding undiplomatic. There’s always a carnival that’s just been posted and the host may feel that it’s a comment aimed at them. The reason I’m happy mentioning it now is that the 1st anniversary edition of Four Stone Hearth has gone up today, and it’s clearly a good one. Tim Jones has paired up my thing on the foundation of Massalia with Dennis Price’s post on Pytheas which is an example of why Blog Carnivals can be useful in drawing together discussion on a subject. I’d recommend reading the post on Pytheas and, of course, the carnival.

As a final point if I were setting up a blog carnival today, the other thing I would do is steal an idea from Henry Cate. He runs the Carnival of Space. What he’s done is set up an email list so I get weekly warnings that the next Carnival is due. Usually this just tweaks my guilt a little, but it is also a helpful reminder when I do write something relevant to submit it to the carnival. It’s surprising how much of a difference it makes and it probably explains why it’s viable to run the carnival on a weekly basis.