Administrivia
CotC Relaunch!
Carnival of the Capitalists went on hiatus almost a year ago, and I had not really expected it to return, much as I often missed it. What a year to skip, too, on the topics of business and economics.
I’ve discussed restarting it, here and elsewhere, perhaps with a different official headquarters, but had not pursued it. Then I had an idea that reinvents it and enforces brevity in the time I devote to it.
I have been using Twitter heavily, substantially overlapping what I might otherwise emit via blogging, while going beyond it. Long ago I started a Twitter account for CotC, which mostly lay fallow as did CotC itself.
So… Each entry in a weekly edition of Carnival of the Capitalists will be a tweet in CotC on Twitter. A digest of those will publish here weekly via Twitter Tools, so you may see the collection as a single post at one time. You may also follow CotC from your Twitter account to see the component link entries as they happen, or you may check the CotC Twitter page to peruse them.
I figure a description and automatically shortened URL should not need more than 140 characters. Keeping it there, I can’t be verbose and the carnival won’t be an outrageous time sink. If I want to write longer posts aside from CotC, that’s my problem. I’d like to think you’ll see some appear here, once I get back into the groove.
And entering? You may e-mail the traditional way, thecotc@gmail.com, but you may also direct an @ reply on Twitter to @CotC followed by your link and an associated text. If you enter via Blog Carnival, it goes to the e-mail address, and you may find that convenient.
Topics? Haven’t changed. I would love to see a bit more on the philosophical side, and I expect entries to swirl around recent and current financial, economic and business events. This is the business and economics carnival. That’s a huge range. In general, all the old information on this site is obsolete or superceded, but relevant topics remain so.
You don’t have to be the author to submit. Blog posts are preferred, but especially good mainstream articles will be considered. Substantive and original are still preferred, but exceptions are not out of the question.
Submissions will not automatically be included, or included in the week that by rights they ought to have been in.
The weekly CotC post should publish Monday morning, automatically, ready or not, with whatever I have gotten into tweets during the week. The first will be Monday, January 12, 2009, and will be largely experimental, a beta if you will, since I have not tested the weekly digest function yet, and am a bit late announcing this.
Will it fly? I’d like to think it’s a good time for this sort of thing, done in a way that breaks with the past. I’d like to think that adding Twitter to the mix will expand the audience and generate some excitement.
Here goes…
Not Rocket Science: The New CotC
Apparently there is some confusion about how Carnival of the Capitalists has changed in an effort to save it, and perhaps benefit from all the effort I’ve put in over the years.
Preface
Blog carnivals as a concept have run their course, in the original definition.
A well-done periodic collection of quality links is not necessarily obsolete, though it’s easy to find and filter stuff these days, compared to, say, 2003 when CotC started.
Carnival of the Capitalists does have some brand recognition, presumably some value, and some modest no-matter-what following. It had developed a quality problem, and had long been bleeding readers.
The theory was, it was worth saving, but would need to change.
Goals included getting more traffic by staying put and being better, getting built-in traffic by staying put on a site that self-generated traffic, not relying on heavy hitter links each edition, and being able to monetize site traffic that happens to include CotC. More ambitious possibilities included being linked or picked up by a mainstream publication, after stabilizing and growing again.
Changes in Content and Submissions
Submissions through Blog Carnival will be phased out. The official e-mail address is different: bizosphere@gmail.com. Entries are expected to be hand-generated and include a link and a brief description/justification for inclusion. Anyone may enter a great post they liked.
Inclusion or exclusion starts with whether or not it’s on-topic and so forth, but beyond that is completely arbitrary and up to the host, who also hand-picks posts that were not entered. Items that are included, while we encourage the obscure and the might not see otherwise, can include articles or posts from mainstream publications or their adjunct blogs.
Entries are pre-screened by me, so the host only sees the better ones, or ones about which I am on the fence.
Entry cutoff remains 3 PM eastern time Sunday.
On-topic still means the same. Some other elements are technically more flexible, like whether you could submit two posts, or have two included, though the preference would still be for one, and they are expected to be especially compelling.
Changes in Hosting
CotC no longer migrates from blog to blog.
Each host acts as a guest editor, with the post published here.
Hosts get to put their imprint and spin on an edition, and are promoted heavily. So far, a large proportion of out clicks each edition seem to be people checking out the host, so that actually seems to work, for relatively modest values of traffic.
As mentioned, I forward the host pre-screened entries. This is complete by sometime Monday morning, and usually Sunday evening. I forward them regularly during the week.
The publication day is now Tuesday, rather than Monday, allowing longer for the host to finalize an edition and, if needed, locate and include more good links. Plus Monday was too crowded with carnivals and, well, being Monday.
The host logs in directly to this WordPress account and saves the post as a draft.
I review it, tack on an intro or ending as needed, making sure the host has been appropriately credited, publish it and check all the links, fixing as needed any that are wrong, malformed or missing from their anchor text.
I announced it for CotC Twitter followers.
I announce it on the mailing list.
I update the edition lists, past and future.
I no longer update at Blog Carnival, because it’s been changed to not a carnival, except in brand name and as a matter of history and spirit, perhaps.
Finally
My big concern centered on whether it would be worthwhile for people to host, and whether I would attract any hosts. I believe the answers so far have been “reasonably so” and “not really any harder than it had become under the floating carnival model.” It’s just that it had become challenging.
I’m not so concerned about attracting entries, because we are less reliant on and less likely to use them, and instead of random blogs, it’s always on a known quantity blog of decent page rank (the only PR5 I have that isn’t a retired blog). Entries may be excluded freely, but it’s more meaningful when they are included. There has been a reduction, because people mostly failed to follow along when I changed things, and are less prone to drive-by submissions on Blog Carnival when no new upcoming edition has been listed. The overall quality of what we get has improved.
I’d like to keep it going, even with a continued few hours of work a week involved. It’s just that doing the entire thing myself adds to the time involved, and it’s reaching a tipping point. If the new concept doesn’t attract guest hosts most weeks, it’s going to have to end, or become an irregular feature by the same name at this blog.
Are there any questions I didn’t answer?
Update:
Political Calculations has a great discussion of blog carnivals as an early form of social media. I couldn’t have said it better. Included is a comparison between the current traffic charts and Ironman’s CotC traffic experience back in 2005.
CotC on Twitter
You can now follow Carnival of the Capitalists on Twitter, where we’ll announce each new edition and sometimes other things. Logically the CotC profile is at http://twitter.com/cotc.
Hosts and Posts
We’ve finally received some entries this week that might make it into the next CotC edition. They’re coming in somewhat lightly, and what does come in tends to be from the knee-jerk entrants that did so much to drive the change. There is surely a place for those, like one of the more freewheeling carnivals, or one of the carnivals for which they’re, say, actually on topic.
However, we’d still like entries! Just mean them, eh?
We’re going to need hosts for all weeks following this one. That is, starting with the Tuesday, February 5 edition. Hosting is different these days. For one thing, you don’t actually have to be a blogger yourself.
Oh sure, it makes sense if you are. You’d be more used to putting a post like this together. You’d be more interested in the self-promotion involved. But anyone could do it, if they were interested.
You see, the edition itself is hosted here, not on your blog. The process goes something like this:
As the host, you get link(s) as appropriate, bragging rights, and the ability to promote your blog, business or cause a bit, while also putting your spin on the content.
If interested, you can e-mail host or jay @ this here domain, or one of the previously mentioned addresses.
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:
Taking the above list one at a time, then:
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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