Rethinking the Blog Carnival

We’re hosting the 48th edition of BlawgReview this week at Rethink(IP). In drafting our edition of the review, Steve, Doug and I did our usual collaborative thing - we fired up Writely and Skype, and starting writing. We hosted Carnival of the Capitalists before, so we were aware of the work involved with a carnival and the general style, and we quickly slipped into “carnival writing” mode.

But then we stopped. One of us asked a question that halted us in our tracks (we have a habit of rethinking things…). It seemed easy enough - “what is the purpose of a blog carnival?” But as we considered it, we realized the complexity of it all. Is a carnival just a means for the submitters to garner Google juice? If so, what value are the hosts/editors adding other than shouldering the burden of assembling links and coming up with some humourous language that connects seemingly unrelated posts?

Hmmm….

We decided that a carnival is more (or should be more). As hosts, we wanted to add value. So we reviewed the submitted posts with the readers in mind. We picked the posts that, we thought, would spark the most thinking amongst the readers.

So check out the Rethink(IP) version of BlawgReview. You can keep track of BlawgReview here as the carnival tours the blogosphere.