With a carnival as popular as the Carnival of Personal Finance it helps to have an extra something to get readers involved in reading the post.  Looking at a list of several dozen or even a hundred posts is overwhelming.  What the crossword accomplished is that it got readers looking at each category in turn.  Looking at a category with maybe ten posts is a whole lot more manageable.  I would imagine that individual articles got more eyeball time than they otherwise might have.

I’m sure there are other ways to structure a carnival so that each category gets a little more “love” from readers.  Your participants will thank you.

Initially, when the Carnival of Personal Finance started up, the philosophy was to try to include everyone who submitted a post.  The idea was to encourage participation, create something that was greater than the sum of its parts, and create a collaborative, cooperative environment for personal finance bloggers.  Not that Flexo has lost his sense of community now that over 100 editions have been posted and his carnival has become the target of more and more spammy posts, but he’s begun to ask more of the posters and also of the hosters.

A similar set of guidelines were put out by the manager of the Carnival of the Capitalists when I guest-hosted.  This is also a large carnival.  The management here comes in the form of a detailed page on the CotC blog.

Having some rules when the carnivals get large adds some structure and keeps the hosts from getting too overwhelmed.  (The recent host of the Carnival of Personal Finance asked for more posts over at the MBN Forums so apparently some folks aren’t overwhelmed easily!) However, the rules are an additional burden on the hosts and can deter them from signing on.

Where’s the “sweet spot” for how much to manage a carnival?

The Carnival of Debt Reduction hasn’t quite gotten to the mega-carnival stage but I still get questions from the hosts about which posts to include.  Basically my instructions to the hosts are to use their judgment and that I’ll support them.  I’d probably hold off instituting a lot of rules as long as possible (basically until I can’t) because I’m not really big on rules in general.  But if it gets to the point that the hosts start feeling overwhelmed then I might not have much choice.  As far as having a “best of” section, how to order the posts in the carnival, what posts to reject, how to present the carnival, how to handle people who don’t link back, etc., leaving many of these decisions up to the host allows the individual nature of the host to come out more.

So here are some tests to see if you need more regulation in your carnival:

• Are there lots of off-topic posts submitted?  Then define the topic better or give authority to the hosts to nix off-topic posts.
• Are submitters being lazy linking back?  Then start keeping a list of the worst offenders.
• Are the hosts starting to cave in under the load?  Then it might be time to start restricting the size, or otherwise make things a little easier for the hosts.  Or at the very least define what hosts are to do a little more.  (Without hosts, carnivals can be a lot of work!)