Carnival of the Capitalists

Here’s the Deal

In some ways, I don’t care if I do CotC at all, ever, and I’d certainly rather not feel under a deadline or any particular constraint. I went a long way toward automating things when I added Twitter to the mix, but I still stressed about it, and still tried to bookend the tweets for the week with ones that would pretty up and add information to each automatically generated edition.

We are also in a time when, as a post I have yet to write but have itched to for a few months would say, we are all business bloggers now. People who barely touched business and economics topics are loaded, because of the political and economic climate. (Guess climate change can be a problem…) That makes it both a target rich environment for linking and finding links, and a strangely “me too” environment where I feel like Just One More.

But I have this here site, and I’d planned to develop it and split CotC onto it while Bizosphere went another way. Why? There is revenue from Bizosphere, but it is in my ex wife’s name and accrues to helping support the kids, as if my old blog were paying the child support. This site gives me the best opportunity of any I have in development to generate a stream of side revenue, however small, to supplement my income. While at the same time returning me to the original purpose I had in mind for Bizosphere - if I ever get around to posting or getting other authors to post - of being a general business blog, or perhaps some sort of master resource of business blogging. I don’t mind building that up and keeping revenue going that supports the kids - or that might sometime get transferred to my name - but the key right now is to add some juice that I control.

Anyway, the plan is to start tweeting links with the @CotC account again. They should generate a post here automatically each week, and it will be named Carnival of the Capitalists. I am just going to make no effort to put a minimum or maximum or ideal number of items, or to put any explanatory text at beginning or end, or anything like that. I’ll work on getting an explanation onto this site, make sure it is clear where links of possible interest can be sent besides via Twitter to @CotC. If I get nothing done on it in a given week, oh well. But I’ll try to tweet the good stuff I find. Which can be followed on Twitter, or by looking here at the digest of it. There could be other posts, besides administrative, but no promises.

Eventually I’ll fix or replace the pages that tell how to enter and so forth. That’s background processing, when I get blocks of time. Which I do, if I can just keep it organized and remember that’s on the agenda.

Some of what I tweet first will probably be old, because I’ve accumulated stuff I never used. Here goes…

Pardon the Mess

I just imported the contents of Bizosphere to get what would be relevant as historical announcements and CotC editions cross-posted here.

That means there’s a bunch of extraneous stuff I am working on deleting, and will probably not be able to finish deleting immediately.

That also means it imported the pages. Hadn’t thought of that. I was going to create new ones from scratch, copying as needed. That will have to be fixed.

Creative Construction

Once again, change comes to Carnival of the Capitalists. Not to address the entire history or what this place is about in this post, if you’re new to it, but to note that this is a new location, which was also a previous location, but in the previous form it was merely the info site, and in the new form it will be the location of, picking up from Bizosphere, which has been both, and haltingly a business blog in its own right. Um… you got that?

No? Okay then…

When CotC started, it being the first niche/topic-specific “carnival” - meaning generated mainly from post author submissions, as opposed to being generated entirely by someone creating a link roundup - based on the original Carnival of the Vanities, one of my innovations was to have a dedicated web page with information and a list of hosts. There is still a page in that location, still one of the top search hits for Carnival of the Capitalists, and maintained as a source of redirection.

Eventually I thought it might be easier to maintain as a blog, and ended up with one in pMachine at thecotc.com. That was mainly for info and to announce when each edition came out, as they were hosted here, there and everywhere in what I consider true blog carnival fashion.

I came up with the domain idea Bizosphere.com, intending it to be far more than a mere home of CotC, but using it as such because it sounded cooler, easily brought me into WordPress for everything, and resulted in automatic boost for the rest of the content that was to be there. TheCotC.com was actually supposed to expire, but the registrar had it on autorenew and it got past me, to my utterly broke dismay.

Eventually people to host became harder to find, and I tried a change to hosting every edition at Bizosphere. That was a lot of work, depending whether I had a guest do the actual post for me. We were in a position where something that was several hours a week distraction from other things was a negative, even if I loved it, and it wasn’t clear the public interest was there or, frankly, that there would ever be payoff to take it all beyond a labor of love, source of minor internet fame, and prospective career (or career change) credential. I bowed to pressure and reasoning, real or imagined, and suspended CotC entirely.

Then came Twitter.

I’ve been known for verbosity, and my writing of descriptions for CotC entries was, while often a thing of beauty, no exception, and thus part of the time sink problem. There was also the work of compiling it into a post overall, which tended to be done last minute.

That wasn’t in a vacuum. I’d always regretted letting that interest amd others fall by the wayside. Some people were fans of CotC and did want it to continue/return. I was encouraged by Scott Allen’s interest in hosting it with my help on an ongoing basis at his now former About.com site.

The breakthrough idea was to use a CotC Twitter account, long established but little used. That would enforce concise posting of entries - too concise, perhaps - and enable a weekly post to be compiled automatically. People could click through to the links on Twitter, or could come to the carnival digest of those tweets. There might be other options available in the future, should I want to explore what could be done fueled by Twitter.

That meant giving up on having a blog carnival by the definition I was instrumental in creating, creating instead a similar beast built on an established if fallow brand name. It would no longer travel, or even have guest editors in-place. It would, I decided, no longer be rigidly for blog posts or limited to one per blog. “Of great interest” might be enough, rather than merely going for substantively original quality writing. And there would be neither the extensive blurb “hooks” to get people to go to the link, nor always an unambiguous link making clear the target, since either I or Twitter would usually use a URL shortening tool.

Would it fly? Eh, it’s not lit the internet on fire, but everyone is now onto business and economics, considering the times.

Would it fulfill the promise of keeping my time devoted to it modest? Yes!

Since it does that, and it is content, and a blog with content can generate a trickle of money, that means it stays indefinitely. I’ve not made a big push to improve the quality and number of submissions, and have relied heavily on my own discoveries, but we’ll see what happens after a grand, or even not so grand, reopening here.

There were two things that led me to move CotC-proper to its own domain. One is that Bizosphere is about tapped for revenue it might produce, short of becoming more prominent and well-trafficked, and that revenue is in my pending ex-wife’s name, which may also change, but even if it does, building for the future seems logical. The other is that I find myself itching to write further commentary on some of what goes into CotC, but that seems awkward or inappropriate to me, so I’ve resisted. Time considerations aside.

Thus I will try to do what I failed to before, use Bizosphere for meatier posts, using the fact I am back on CotC to provide inspiration.

I’ll finish by giving myself a to do list:

After that it’s the routine stuff.

PS - I’m using my real name on new and some existing blogs, for the most part, in keeping with everything changing in my life and leaving old associations behind.

Tangled Bank

It’s sort of off-topic for here, but it is a sibling/offspring blog carnival to the on-hiatus CotC. Plus I think it’s cool that it’s hosted by Nobel Intent at Ars Technica, so here is the 106th edition of Tangled Bank.

Have I Mentioned Lately…

To come back later? There’s no way it shouldn’t be up today. Everything is read and more or less selected out of the submissions. I almost stopped yesterday long enough to write a post on how to be summarily excluded. On the other hand, that won’t be quite as relevant going forward?

Why?

If I wrote business-related posts regularly, say one or more a week, I would expect no more than a few per year to make it into CotC. There’s nothing special about most of what I write.

Except… I’d know that and would try to determine which few per year to send in, so a significant portion of what I entered would be included. While I’d like to think I’d be able to tell what’s likely to be that good, if you really can’t tell, so you enter something every week, you have to assume that most of them will be ignored.

It’s time to get over any presumption you might still have that if you enter, you will be included, and that it’s insulting if you aren’t. This is not going to be your blogfather’s CotC anymore.

Here are some easy guidelines, beyond just assuming you should only enter the best of the best:

Don’t have a popup ad or subscription box.
Don’t be marked red by SiteAdvisor.
Don’t be boring. First paragraph or so ought to make me want to keep going.
Don’t cite too much outside text in proportion to yours.
Don’t be a run of the mill how to post.
Especially on a blog that’s obviously there as an obligatory ad revenue generator.
Especially if it’s part of an exclusively interlinked set of such blogs.
Which is not to say nobody should have ads or have groups of blogs.
But it’s usually surprisingly easy to know the ones I mean when you see them.
Don’t get caught plagiarizing.
Don’t be off-topic.
Personal advice is off-topic.
Even if it’s financial in nature.
Unless we’re feeling like making an exception.
Exceptions may be made for excellent posts, or they might be linked outside the CotC proper.
Don’t be old.
Be an actual blog post, though this may change.
Don’t be unable to write.
Don’t be mundane.
Don’t be in a language other than English, sorry.
Don’t give the appearance of being scam or spam connected.
Don’t be disproportionately linky.
Obviously meaning pure link posts are inappropriate.

Probably something I’ve forgotten, but if you’re clear on the rest you’re likely to have a chance of being included.

Okay, back to work.

Update:

I forgot a couple things. One is that video and audio posts may be excluded out of hand, even if exceptions are made sometimes.

Another is the old multiple entries rule. If you are self-submitting, you should have a grasp of what post in the last couple weeks has been outstanding compared to others. Entering five of them from the same blog? You’re just adding work for us and asking for none of them even to be considered.

January 7 CotC at Small Business Essentials

Small Business Essentials presents the January 7 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists.

Next week’s host will be Bizosphere. I never heard back from the volunteer for whom I’d have delayed that by a week.

As noted on the CotC mailing list and at least implied elsewhere, CotC will be changing again. The experiment in improving quality while keeping it a traditional blog carnival has failed.

In keeping with that, this may be the last week in which entries are accepted via the Blog Carnival submission form. In keeping with that, and the fact they’ve never been posts may be suggested for inclusion by anyone, not just self-submitted by the blogger in question. For the time being use thecotc@gmail.com for that. Blog posts get precedence, but business articles in other publications will be considered as well.

December 31 CotC at SEO ROI

SEOROI presents the December 31 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists.

Next week’s host will be Small Business Essentials.

I thought I had a host lined up for the January 14 edition, but have not heard back. Stay tuned. There are no hosts scheduled beyond then, and they may or may not be needed in the traditional form Feel free to volunteer, just in case. I have possible major changes firmly in mind for CotC, but that won’t preclude “host” participation to add a distinct flavor each week.

Q-U-A-L-I-T-Y

What part of “quality posts on business and economics” is so confusing?

I went to clean out the Gmail account in preparation for the next edition and, unusually for me, took the liberty of peeking at the fourteen submissions received so far.

They suck.

If I stretched it I might include, say, four of them. Going back and evaluating more closely, I might even include one or two legitimately, but my first impulse on quick review is that none of them fully meet the spirit of excellence that CotC is supposed to embody.

As I contemplate but remain uncertain about changing CotC again, that perusal felt like a nudge in the direction of abandoning the old model.

December 24 CotC at The Journal Blog

The Journal Blog at MicroEnterprise Journal presents the December 24 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists.

Next week’s host will be SEO ROI.

We need more hosts starting with the January 14 edition.

December 17 CotC at SamaBlog

Rob Sama presents the December 17 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists. This is the same time Rob hosts each year, around the time of his birthday, on the 14th.

That also places it near enough Christmas for some embellishment. You may recall it has been borderline NSFW or offensive to some in the past. It’s bold and glittery, but shouldn’t bother people

Next week’s host will be The Journal Blog. Hosts are line up through January 7th, but we will need more after that, and 2008 is not so far away.

Last minute gift shopping? Check out the Neatly Tangled shop for a different selection of handcrafted gifts and accessories. Items ordered Orders of $10 or more December 17 through 19 will be upgraded free to priority mail within the US.

Martha, Monica and Jeremy remain available as I type this, even as their two counterparts were rapidly adopted. Check out coasters as a modest yet distinctive gift for the person who has most everything. Make a gift card more special by delivering it in a gift card cozy, which is a reusable gift in its own right, a relative of coin purses and card wallets. For the avid reader in your life there are bookmarks. Check it out. Don’t see anything you want just now? Be sure to visit again regularly to see what’s new throughout the year.