Future of the Military History Carnival
I’ve decided that I want to stop organising the Military History Carnival. Therefore I’m looking for someone to take over, provided that enough people think it’s worth continuing at all. Submissions and hosts have been hard to find recently. Sharon Howard mentioned similar problems with the History Carnival earlier this year, so maybe history carnivals have jumped the shark.
Comment by Jeremy Young — 6:53 am, 4 January 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
I sincerely hope history carnivals haven’t jumped the shark. They’re one of the most important democratizing influences in the history blogosphere. That said, I do know they’re both a huge pain to organize and an enormous time commitment to host (my three times hosting the History Carnival took a huge toll on me in all sorts of ways).
There’s just got to be some way to do these things that doesn’t eat the souls of the people who organize them. Would some sort of Digg-like rankable aggregator of history blog posts be more manageable? (The best answer from an efficiency perspective would be to have all history bloggers post on a single big community blog, but I understand very well why many wouldn’t want to do this.)
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 12:23 pm, 5 January 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
Carnivals are important for drawing attention to new blogs and helping new bloggers to feel included. On the other hand I mentioned somewhere before a suspicion that carnivals might inadvertantly appear elitist to some people, and that the assumption that being included is a big honour might put people off from submitting their own posts.
I’m not sure if Digg style voting would be any more popular. It looks like not many people have submitted sites to History Nexus.
Maybe the best thing bloggers can do is just keep posting interesting links on their own blogs, especially if they have some meaningful response to the posts they’re linking to. Conversations between bloggers are more valuable than lists of links.