Carnival of the Capitalists

At Last! This Week’s Newsy Carnival of the Capitalists…

This is going to be a long introduction, as there is much to say. If you are eager to get past it, scroll on down for the entries. Way down.

Blog carnivals as a concept are dead. They have been for a while. Horse flesh seldom looked so tenderized. I had planned to write a post detailing why I say that, and still do. As such, it’s become clear that Carnival of the Capitalists cannot continue as it has; as a topical blog carnival in the traditional definition I largely originated.

Sure, now it’s a brand. Not as positive or well-known a brand as it ought to be, but worth keeping. So how do you create something called Carnival of the Capitalists, keep the best of what that was supposed to but couldn’t be as a more or less “crowd sourced” meme, then improve it and add value from there?

Leaving Intending to leave any more verbose explanations for other posts, it goes something like this:

Carnival of the Capitalists will be a weekly post on bizosphere.com, where there may be some number of other posts, no longer mainly administrative. While retaining the name, there will be no pretense of being a blog carnival under the old definition, which many so-called carnivals didn’t adhere to in the first place.

It will seek to include a set of links to especially compelling recent blog posts on business and economics topics.

It will attempt to build on the idea there are good posts that few will ever see, out there on random blogs few will ever hear of, and that it’s good for the blogosphere to bring them to the attention of more people, including people who might not do much blog reading. Not that posts from better known blogs will be excluded out of hand, but the same people being in CotC every week, with posts good, bad or indifferent, runs counter to Rob’s original idea of discovery.

Where will these links come from?

In part, they will come from submissions. Those can be self-submitted, as most have been in the past. They can also be submitted by readers who like what they see, which has always been permitted, but seldom done and not advertised.

In part, they may be hand-picked by the host editor, who can be a different person or team week to week. For the next edition, that will either be me, or a possible volunteer I have in mind. For subsequent editions? If you’re interested, feel free to e-mail: host at bizosphere dot com. Please send from a monitored, valid e-mail address, and be aware that the address replying to you will not be the “host” address.

Why be a host under the new concept? Let’s go back to why be a host under the original concept.

The reasons for hosting were:

get your blog noticed by the hordes of readers, as well as entrants

get a bunch of incoming links from all the people, including many of the entrants, who would link your CotC post and perhaps your main page as well

get a bunch of traffic to boost your stats and ego

be able to pimp your own blog, services, products, primo posts, or those of your friends

give something back to the blogosphere and feel all warm and fuzzy

be part of a relatively small and presumably “elite” set of people

get at least one permanent link from the CotC home site in relative perpetuity

get to put your own spin on an edition, preferably without pissing everyone off

add credibility if you wanted to opine about the running or direction of CotC

probably something I’ve forgotten

Taking the above list one at a time, then:

There are no longer hordes of readers. Perhaps we can change that and reflecting some to you will be an improvement

Few people link an edition of CotC.

See the first two items.

Self-promotion would still be possible, and how cool is that?

No change.

No change, except possibly to be more elite. The new LinkedIn CotC hosts group would still be available.

Wouldn’t you still expect to get a link as a past host/editor? And you’d be right.

Own spin? Try hand picking posts, perhaps having a theme, and if I trust you to be an editor and have oversight, probably no more pissing everyone off. Besides, nobody will be able to presume their entry will get in each and every week, which limits reason to be annoyed.

Indeed.

Yup, probably.

That doesn’t really sound worse. Some of the details will need to be worked out. For instance, will an editor comb the interwebs for hand-picked posts, while I screen entries? Will I pre-screen entries and forward the better ones to the editor to select from? Not sure. The first guest editors/hosts will help shape the details, is what I’m thinking.

The model I have in mind is what a business magazine with an online presence might do to add value for readers and engage with the business blogosphere.

Yeah, you want people to come read your articles, or your in-house blogs. However, once a week you have an editor comb blogs for cool business posts readers might not see otherwise, and that might be topics or angles they wouldn’t see in your virtual pages. Going even more progressive, you give readers or bloggers a way to suggest posts they have seen or written. You might even toss links to some of it, or posts centered around those links, in some of the routine posts. The cream, though, goes in the roundup, suitably narrated and/or quoted to help readers pick what they want to click.

Instead of “best of the web today,” think of it as “best of the business blogosphere this week.”

Let’s see, anything else offhand?

This site will be redesigned. I expect to be looking for ads or sponsorship or whatever, and there are a couple possible routes to that already in mind. I estimated recently that I’d put in about $60,000 in work managing CotC over the years. Given the choice of killing it off and accepting quality can never be kept up under the existing model, or dramatically changing it in a way that revives and improves it and holds a chance of recompense, of course I’m going to attempt the latter, no hiding or apologizing for it.

The archival CotC material will be kept, especially links to past editions that still exist. There’s a lot of history there, and a ton of gratitude to everyone who participated.

I’m going to phase out submissions through the Blog Carnival site, helpful as their almost 100% spam-free submission form has been. Any random blogger can show up there and enter any old thing, knowing or caring nothing about CotC. The form encourages entries lacking a description of the entry by the blogger entering.

Entries should be sent to bizosphere at gmail dot com, from a valid, monitored e-mail address. They should include links to the post and blog. They should include a brief description of the post and perhaps why you think it ought to be included. If you are not the author, let us know. Blogs are the intended entrants for CotC. However, it’s not out of the question that we might entertain linking mainstream articles, clearly indicated as such. More importantly, that’s the kind of thing I might like to link during the week, between editions.

Which implies you don’t have to be e-mailing a link intending it for CotC, but can e-mail one for general consideration.

We’re going to keep a deadline for now, with respect to CotC submissions. It will remain 3:00 PM eastern time on Sunday. If it arrives after that, it is presumed to go in next week’s batch.

The big change will be the edition day. Yeah, if we’re ready we might publish early; as early as Sunday night. However, I’m declaring Tuesday the new CotC day. There were various reasons for choosing Monday originally, some still valid, others, like not conflicting with “the other carnival” by avoiding Wednesday, are moot. So hey, I’m only a day late now, instead of two. Go me!

I’ve typed enough “meet the new boss” introduction. I will post further on details at Bizosphere - Home of Carnival of the Capitalists as needed or inspired to get and keep things rolling. The caveat is I am also busy with other things, like trying to bring in enough money to pay rent in a couple weeks.

Here are the entries, almost but not exactly in the order received. Be sure to scan all the way through, as some of the best are toward the end. There are also some I tagged “maybe” and didn’t include in the heat of putting this together, but perhaps should have in some cases.

If you’ve been scrolling to reach the entries, you can stop now!

This is all from submissions. My plot to make this the first newfangled edition failed, so it’s the last more or less fully traditional edition, depending how things go as far as the next one.

Green Rising somehow escaped my “excess cited text” detector with Battle of the Bees, about an unlikely acquisition by Clorox in its attempt to be and seem more “green.”

Ian Welsh sounds a rather cynical tone in Why Financial Crises Will Keep Happening. Not the only entry, included or not, that struck me so, or that went into financial crises or talk of recession, or into how prosperity for others abroad must be bad for us. It’s interesting to host and see such spontaneous themes.

Steven Lohrenz asks the burning question Can Your Business Survive A Major Failure? Featuring Army wisdom.

Keeping it on a similar note of coping with disaster, or at least change, What is Adaptive Capacity? Follow the link and Never the Same River Twice will explain.

Do You Feel Compelled to Support Your Boss’s Personal Interests? This Free Money Finance might not have made it in, but I’ve been there, and I doubt it’s unusual. If not pressure to buy cookies, then to donate - perhaps even through regular withholding - to a charity the company (it can go beyond an individual boss) supports. It may not be as common anymore, but companies used to “allow” automatic contributions to United Way, with varying pressure. I posted about them in 2005. The links that inspired that post are dead, but it still gives you the family experience.

Continuing with post titles in the form of a question (Alex Trebek would be proud), InsureBlog asks if you’ve been Audited Lately? Not by the IRS, but by an insurance company, to enable them to torment you save money.

Business and Blogging issues a Challenge: Can You Stump Business and Blogging? Well, can ya punk? Identify a legal small business that could not possibly benefit from blogging. I wonder if anyone can come up with a convincing one.

It’s not quite a thousand million questions, and there’s no knocking at the door, but here’s one last entry in a bumper crop of interrogatively titled posts. Motivation Through Job Enrichment: What Are The Key Components? The Personal Financier has tips, though sometimes I wonder how much of the conventional wisdom is off.

I love the expression “fog sculpting” in a related Trust Matters post: Employee Engagement, Fog Sculpting, and Measuring Love.

Tax Rules Eased for Home-Office Sales, according to Work at Home Business Solutions. Didn’t notice how oddly setup the blog is when I flagged it for inclusion.

On a less positive note, Trader’s Narrative declares We Are In A Recession, with graphs and historical trends to prove it. My perception has been that there has been almost a societal or media wish for a recession, and building the belief in one has been helping it creep ever closer to true. Kind of like causing failure by expecting failure, perhaps tossing in self-sabotage to ensure it, on a societal level. As long as there’s an IT Worker Shortage, or demand for people who know blogging, I ought to be fine.

Is there really a fixed pie and static technological development making economic success in other countries bad for us in more developed countries? That’s what I take away from How The World’s Cheapest Car Is Bad For Your Wallet, in which Living Off Dividends suggests a big downside to the introduction of the seemingly brilliant Tata Motors Nano.

Econbrowser explains in easily followed detail the modern Mortgage securitization process. I had a rough idea how it worked, but nothing so coherent, or that went into how things went awry.

Jim Logan reminds us that simple ideas can be some of the best for increasing sales at little extra cost or effort, yet are easily overlooked. Be sure to read 7 tips to boost profits before you close the box to see how brilliant the obvious can be.

Hire People that are Better than You is one I planned when I saw it to hold out as an example of what I mean by a superlative CotC entry, so it makes sense it came from Nikole at Small Business Essentials. She hosted last week’s edition, which you might want to check out if you missed it. Her post is another “obvious” bit of brilliant advice that people tend to forget, or don’t follow out of fear, misdirected ego, or worse.

Searchlight Crusade sounds on the right track in positing The Future of Real Estate Agency: Expert Consultants, Not Market Access. It’s not easy to maintain a guild these days, or to control information, or to not ideally represent client interests.

That’s it for this edition. What do you think of the selections? I invite you to peruse the more simply presented entries that were excluded, and that were on the fence maybes I didn’t go back and cut one way or another, some of which are probably as good as most of the above.

I wanted to show some of the thought process and perception that goes into making selections, even to the point of reading something on a different day or in a different mood perhaps leading to a different result. Some of the inclusions and exclusions truly are arbitrary, no matter who is hosting or editing.

As mentioned, watch this space for additional announcements, content, and links in between CotC editions.

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