"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
17 September 2006The last Carnival barkingThere once was a time when it mattered:
Never underestimate the power of Silflay Hraka. My little outpost on the far fringes of the Blogosphere™ (and if you can explain how a sphere can have fringe, let alone far fringe, you're doing better than I am) scored about thirty percent more traffic than usual, courtesy of Bigwig's Carnival of the Vanities celebration.
In retrospect, given the explosive growth of blogdom and the proliferation of methods for getting noticed, it's perhaps remarkable that the "celebration" made it to its fourth birthday. Nothing in Bigwig's original manifesto suggested anything more than a temporary upheaval of the status quo:
If you'd like to have a link posted, just e-mail one to me, along with a category for it, like Family Life or Domestic Politics or alt.misc.fetishes and a teaser line, like the model BlogCritics uses on its front page. On the off chance you decide that all of your posts are deserving, try to winnow it down to one, ok? People who like your stuff are going to stay awhile, so you'll get more exposure for the rest of your blog, and you'll pick up permanent visitors at a faster pace.
Let me know what you think, and I'll adapt the whole thing as it goes along. I think it'll work well, and will shed some light on stuff that have been otherwise overlooked.I'm looking forward to linking to some of the best stuff in the blogosphere. Of course, that's assuming someone reads this. I did, and I sent this, and some discussion flared up, and Bigwig subsequently observed:
What I'm hoping for with the Carnival is kind of an hourglass effect, where one post pulls in a large number of visitors, and sends them right back out to through the links within it. I think it'll work, but it might not, and if it doesn't then it's at least sparked a couple of other ideas on how to find the quality in the blogosphere.
It worked for four whole years, in fact, and spawned so many sub-Carnivals that the original was eventually forgotten: who's gonna go to the Alamo when there's a party on the Riverwalk? So #209 will be the last. Proposition 209, you may remember, was the controversial California Civil Rights Initiative, passed in 1996, which was controversial largely because its first section — "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting" — didn't allow the Usual Suspects to stack the deck. One of the reasons the Carnival survived for so long was simply that it didn't stack the deck: if you sent something that you thought was your best work of the week, you got your link for it. (It is, of course, true that not every host was equally devoted to this egalitarian cause; the result was a series of "Avignon Editions".) Zeuswood is philosophical about all this:
If a heavily promoted, major landmark in the life of a historic, hugely influential blogospheric institution can’t get links or traffic — not to malign those who did come through for us, thanks! — and not even from many people with a stake, then there is no hope for it week to week. It’s just another way to get links; ironically, without having to write stuff so good or provocative it would have a better chance of generating links on its own. CotV was supposed to help ensure visibility of your best, since most of us have written great stuff that sunk into the blogosphere without so much as a ripple. And links aren’t even the prestige thing they once were. Heck, it’s the readership that matters more, and CotV doesn’t bring that.
I am, to no one's surprise, not exactly happy with this development — I was all ready to go figure out just what it was that led Emperor Severus to travel from Rome to Scotland in 210 — but I understand why it's happening, and when the ride ends, you have to decide whether it was worth the trip. Which, of course, it was. Update, 19 September: Could it be that the reports of the Carnival's death were greatly exaggerated? Well, so much for my prediction that you'd eventually title a post "260." You still might, but it won't be for the reason I was expecting. Posted by: McGehee at 4:36 PM on 17 September 2006A tennis ball. That's a sphere with a fringe. Posted by: Mister Snitch! at 7:08 PM on 17 September 2006 |