The Conservative Cat

Let's use the Carnival of the Cats as an example to see how this works. The carnival organizer is Laurence Simon of This Blog is Full of Crap, and the carnival topic is cats. Laurence has a web page devoted to telling people where to find the carnival and where it's been. For example, you can see that the 47th carnival was hosted here at Conservative Cat.

Each week, cat lovers all over the blogosphere select cat picture articles the've posted to the Carnival, and on Sunday night or Monday morning the host for that week assembles them into a blog article. The article is then listed on the main Carnival of the Cats page so it can be found by people who want to see new cat pictures.

The Carnival of the Cats is a travelling show, but some carnivals have a fixed home. The Best of Me Symphony is permanently housed at Gary Cruse's blog The Owner's Manual, so you always know where to find it. (A list of past symphony posts can be found about halfway down the right side panel.) The Symphony is a showcase carnival. Rather than highlighting posts on a specific topic, it highlights posts of a specific type: in this case, self-selected posts over 60 days old. The oldest of all the carnivals-- the Carnival of the Vanities-- is also a showcase carnival. Participants are asked to select their favorite post of the week. The very first edition can be found here.

Some carnivals are harder to find. For example, the Bonfire of the Vanities has no fixed page telling you where to find it. Instead, you have to hang around at Wizbang and wait for a post that tells you when the latest one has appeared. Some carnivals happen less frequently. For example, The Tangled Bank is only posted every two weeks, and the Carnival of Poets is twice a month.

Most carnivals accept all submissions that meet the basic criteria. Some, however, choose only the best or only a certain number. For example, the Storyblogging Carnival only accepts the top 20 submissions.

If you want to run a carnival, the most important thing you need is publicity. Getting your carnival added to the submit form is a good start, since the sort of people who enjoy participating in carnivals are likely to see it there. Trackbacks are also a key mechanism, as they cause links to your carnival to automatically appear on other blogs. (Click here to learn more about trackbacks.) For the first few weeks, you'll probably want to host the carnival yourself. Once it gets going, you can create a web page for it and turn it into a travelling show. For best results, you should have an EMAIL address dedicated solely to carnival submissions. As the carnival travels, you can set the EMAIL address to forward automatically to the host of the week.

Running a carnival is work, but participating in a carnival is easy. Choose an article you've posted that meets the carnival's criteria and submit it via the Carnival Submission Form. If you want to participate in a carnival that's not listed, let Bruce know and we'll add it.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat