Blogspotter: Ride blog carnivals to useful content
When seeking good blog content, you can Digg for it, join the Technorati, or enjoy a del.icio.us snack — but strolling a blog carnival’s midway can be even more fun and rewarding. To translate: Digg.com and del.icio.us harness the greater Web community to spot, tag and categorize online content, some of it from blogs. Technorati.com is the leading blog search engine.
Lesser-known blog carnivals, meanwhile, regularly share the bounty of a blogger’s — or, most often, a small group’s — research into a single topic. These traveling sideshows take a curatorial approach to presenting the best blog content they can find on a given subject. They also invite visitors to submit posts for consideration as they hop from one host blog to the next.
The first blog carnival pitched its tent Sept. 20, 2002, according to Wikipedia. In the four years since the Silflay Hraka blog entry “Carnival of the Vanities” invited readers to help create “an index of what you and other bloggers think is their best stuff,” hundreds of sites have given the concept a Tilt-a-Whirl.
The 21-month-old BlogCarnival.com now lists more than 530 carnivals, about half of which are actively updated. The ÜberCarnival section of The Truth Laid Bear also indexes these roaming collections of freaks, geeks and curiosity piques.
Good examples of the form include Blawg Review for lawyers, Grand Rounds for health-care workers, I and the Bird for birders, and Circus of the Spineless for anyone interested in invertebrates, said BlogCarnival co-founder Steven Damron via e-mail from San Francisco.
“I think of blog carnivals as self-published magazines and Technorati as a super-duper Yellow Pages,” he said. “Both are valuable, but create very different user interactions. It takes active participation of many individuals to sustain a carnival over a long time, especially sharing hosting duties and getting out the word about new editions. When a blog carnival works, though, it builds longer relationships between bloggers” than other community sites.
When it comes to hot-button topics such as religion and politics, Damron added, “If you want to learn about other points of view, carnivals are a quick study.” He pointed to Carnival of the Cordite and the Second Amendment Carnival as good places “to understand how pro-gun people think about gun issues,” for instance.
At the Web 2.0 Kongress in Frankfurt, Germany, earlier this month, BlogCarnival co-founder Brad Rubenstein described the recipe for a hit carnival. Ingredients include an effective organizer, a critical mass of host bloggers — as well as topics that enjoy passionate followings while occupying niches broad enough to draw lots of submissions. (One personal-finance carnival indexed by the site recently drew 469 posts for review.)
Damron’s latest carnival favorite is the knitting-themed Yarnival! at Needle Exchange. The New York-based Rubenstein likes the new Cirque de Critique, a collection of critical essays that will next be hosted by Hippo Campy.
“We never know how the new carnivals will work out,” Damron noted, “but these two look like they have good potential for shared material and well-targeted audiences.”
Next time you get lost in the blogosphere, look for a carnival barker who can punch your ticket to the best posts on your favorite topic.
Guilty pleasure
Old Grandma Hardcore proves that blogs remain great vehicles for launching cult celebrities. Look past the unsavory name and you’ll find Ohio’s Barbara Sainte-Hilaire, a 70-year-old video game fanatic. After her grandson launched the blog to detail her exploits, she landed a show on MTV2 and snared coverage from media outlets ranging from the CBS Evening News and NPR to the Cleveland Scene alternative weekly (where I learned about the site). But be warned: Although Granny Hardcore appears on the blog fully clothed, she does swear a blue streak while she plays.