Carnival Blogs
I’ve been wondering for a while what exactly a “carnival blog” is since I see it referred to a lot by a blogger I subscribe to. He writes about the Carnival of the Capitalist in particular. Then this morning I noticed a comment on a recent post of mine that’s from one of these blogs. I can’t tell who is producing this blog but what it looks like is a blog that doesn’t produce any original content. They just take images and content from other people’s blogs. Like in this case, mine. They’re topical and as far as I can tell are only in business to create traffic and revenue. But for who? Somehow the idea of someone else using my content to create traffic for themselves isn’t right. I don’t feel good about that. If I’m mis-judging this I would be happy to know how and have someone explain it to me. If I’m not, then maybe I should delete their comment. Anyone have any more information on this or suggestions?
It's time to thank our farmers and ranchers for all their hard work to feed us.
3 Comments
Christopher Carfi
Chuck, a “carnival blog” is a “traveling” blog post that appears at a new site each week. Each weekly “carnival” is created from submissions that have been collected over the previous week. Whoever is “hosting” the carnival that week goes through the submissions, organizes them, provides original commentary and editorial, and puts the post up.
The benefits are threefold:
1) Carnivals allow a wide audience to be exposed to the blogs of folks they normally wouldn’t read
2) Since a different blog “hosts” the carnival each week, the workload to put together the carnival post for that week (which can be 2-4-6 hours or more) is done by a different person every week, so the load is distributed.
3) Some of the carnivals (Carnival of the Capitalists, in particular) have thousands of regular readers, who “follow” the carnival to its place each week. As such, the hosting blog gets exposure to many thousands of new visitors on a week it hosts the carnival. Hopefully, some of those new visitors will stick around and become regular readers.
There are many regular carnivals out there, the CotC is just one of them.
Hope this helps!
best,
c
Chuck
I think I followed most of that. That’s what I had thought, at least as it relates to CotC in particular.
However, what prompted my post on this was a comment on my site that led to a post on Horse Blog (http://horses.blogcarnival.com/) where I found a post from my site. I hadn’t submitted anything to Horse Blog.
I certainly don’t mind extra exposure. I just wanted to make sure I understood what the purpose was.
Christopher Carfi
Gotcha. Not familiar with the Horse Blog…
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