Carnival of the Capitalists gets a makeover

Trudy W. Schuett> The latest edition of the Carnival of the Capitalists features a new look with over half its entries being eliminated.

Torsten Jacobi, the author of TJ’s Weblog, this week’s host, says by way of explanation: “I actually think that shortening the endless scrolling of the latest Carnivals actually helps the event to get going as it grows to a wider popularity.”

Although he does ask for comments, as of this writing, the comments section reveals no support for this idea.

It does seem like a bad idea, especially since one of the authors of submissions appears twice, and there was no suggestion given beforehand that the usual procedure would not apply. What happens, I wonder, to those entries that were eliminated? Are they now in some sort of blog limbo?

We’ll see next week how this plays out. If the next host in the round-robin of volunteers for this Carnival follows suit, this will lead those of us who pay attention to the blogosphere in general to wonder if the Carnival system of blog promotion has had its day. I’ve hosted several different carnivals on my varied blogs, and while it was nice to get that extra traffic, it was lot of intense work on a deadline. Even though signups were often months away, those dates had a way of disappearing in all the other details of daily work, and suddenly popping up in the midst of some other intensive project.

I quit volunteering to host, leaving the both the work and the traffic to others with more focus on Carnivals. After all, the blogosphere is a big place, and I figured that those who were less-established, or newer to the game, would be better served by having one less blogger to compete with, or something. Carnivals are a great way to get your blog launched and let the world know where you are! I still submit occasionally, as they are also a great way to announce a project or an event.

If too many people feel the way I do about hosting, however, this could be bad for Carnivals in general. After all, this was a true innovation in promotion, and it would be hard to come up with an alternative!