Blog Carnival Tips

Last week when I tried to submit my article to the Carnival of Personal Finance over at BlogCarnival.com, I found out that this carnival was “inactive.” At one point the carnival I manage, the Carnival of Debt Reduction, was in danger of becoming inactive over there because I hadn’t updated the hosting list in a while. That is, the carnival wasn’t really inactive — just that BlogCarnival.com hadn’t seen any activity from the maintainer, me.

Flexo, maintainer of the Carnival of Personal Finance, had been making some rumblings about getting away from BlogCarnival.com and using his own submission form, which is here.  This form had been up for months, but I had been holding out and using the BlogCarnival.com form because it filled in more of the information for me and was a little faster.  But this ease of use was the same reason why lots of irrelevant and spammy articles got through.  This was the main reason, I think, that Flexo wanted people to stop using that form and start using his.

For the popular carnivals, spamming is likely becoming an issue, because popular carnivals are, well, popular, and therefore posts that make it in get quite a bit of traffic.  So they’re targets for lots of free links by everyone and their brother.

Going “off the grid” like Flexo may have done might kill smaller carnivals.  BlogCarnival.com does provide a lot of oxygen to newer carnivals because it is a sort of hub, and, spam or no spam, it’s a traffic source that’s hard to ignore.  I guess removing this kind of dependency is a sign of growing up.

Filed under: Commentary