I was catching up with the blogs in my reader and ran across this Carnival of Future Millionaires in my reader.  It was posted this week, and honestly I had forgotten that I had.  (I did not receive an e-mail from the host asking me to link back to the carnival.)

Some things to note about this particular carnival:

• There are 275 posts in the carnival (it’s posted once every four weeks) and nineteen of them were by one author.  Sometimes the Carnival of Debt Reduction doesn’t have 19 posts in the entire thing!
• I didn’t receive any notification that the carnival was up.  As a host, it’s a good thing to ask your submitters to share the carnival with their readers.
• This is clearly a direct cut-and-paste of the InstaCarnival that BlogCarnival.com provides to hosts near the end of the submission period.  Little, if any, editing was done.  The InstaCarnival is a good start but it really looks like an InstaCarnival if that’s all that’s done.
• There’s a lot of white space in between the posts.  This is an artifact of the way the InstaCarnival comes out of the box.
• There are no comments posted on the carnival as of right now, and it’s been up for over three days.  Ouch.

This seems to be an example of “you get out what you put into it.”  Getting the carnival ready to go probably took all of ten minutes, if that:  Log into BlogCarnival (or open up the e-mail with the link to the InstaCarnival), find it, CTRL-A, log into Blogger, New Post, CTRL-C, Publish, done.  But, it looks like the blogger spent all of ten minutes on it, too.

This edition of the carnival is really of minimal use to anyone involved.  It’s not really useful to the host, because no one has even commented on it.  It’s not useful to the people who submitted because their links are buried amongst nearly 300 others, many of which look like some authors submitted everything they ever wrote to that carnival.  And it’s non really useful to the readers because it’s not at all engaging.

I have said before that InstaCarnivals do serve a purpose and that they can bring lots of traffic for little work.  I might amend that a little by saying that InstaCarnivals can bring a lot of traffic if they’re already popular.  The carnival in question here is a new carnival, so it doesn’t have its audience built up.  Unfortunately, InstaCarnivals are not the way to build up a lot of traffic.

I hope How to Make a Million Dollars (the only host of this carnival so far) dresses up the next one a little bit.

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