I did some looking into blog carnivals after hearing a talk by Daniel Mosquin from the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden about engaging different communities with them. From reading on blogcarnival.com I found this:
A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.
To me that sounds like a topic based aggregation service but it’s not in real time, which makes it distinctly less blog-like and, as they mention in that quote, and more resembling an online magazine. Bora Zivkovic compares a blog carnival to a professional science journal on his own blog, he also maintains a list of active carnivals called the meta-carnival. This seems similar to Eyebeam’s ReBlog project, which also rotates through editors (guest bloggers). It might also be compared to smaller scale of Global Voices, which aggregates multiple blogs. The slower pace of carnivals may theoretically attract more thoroughly researched papers and grow an audience not interested in blogging because they see the fast pace of most blogs as frantic. In practice however neither of those conjectures are true about the blog carnivals I’ve seen.
We briefly discussed a museum centric blog carnival with Jim from Ideum while we were at the conference. I’m not sure if a carnival, or an aggregator or reBlogging is the best idea, but it’s certainly something we are interested in hearing ideas about.
Looking at the two linked blog carnivals, Science and Plitics and BlogCarnival.com, it appears that there really isn’t anything out there devoted to blogs about art, be it ancient, modern, or contemporary. (I think I’ve left a few periods out there, but you’ll get my point.) Jim at Ideum has done an initial survey of museum blogs, but a blog carnival would be more inclusive, with writings by others about the kinds of content we present. I’m interested. What’s the next step?
Comment by Peter Samis — March 29, 2006 @ 8:41 pm
I heard from Jim today – he’s got some catching up to do and then was going to (I think) propose some next steps for this idea. I’m new to the notion of a “blog carnival” but after hearing the term it turns out I’d been reading a few without knowing it… I think Jim’s big impetus for this – rightly – is that museum blogs (science in particular) are behind the curve in terms of “authority”. If we can team up and start linking to each other while putting out some good content, that will definitely help. We’ll hopefully know more in a few days…
Comment by Nate — March 29, 2006 @ 10:25 pm
Three core ideas of a “blog carnival” are rotating the location it is hosted (on some ones blog), rotating the editor, and growing a community that submits articles.
So the first thing to happen would be finding a group of people willing to take on the editorial duties. Then that group would need to decide on a publication schedule, once a month, week or quartlerly (Honestly once a week seems to much to often while it’s getting started).
The other thing I’d like to see up for discussion is the rotating location. Does it makes sense to move the carnival from site to site? That is part of what generates the traffic and “authority”, but that would exclude any museum without a blog, which unfortunately is most of them. We’d be happy to give any editor without a blog “guest blogging” priviledges on our site, but that seems to defeat the purpose as well.
That made me think a central location might be smart, then it would feel more like a quarterly/monthly online magazine and less carnivalish, really I put this post up to start people thinking/talking and because I didn’t want to forget the topic of helping museum blogs and sites get better recognized.
Comment by eric — March 30, 2006 @ 10:59 am
I took a look at the blog carnival and wouldn’t you know they have a carnival for creationists! Anyway, I wish had an easy solution for our communities issue of authority (of the lack of it!).
I think one simple first step might be to create a listserv (so Web 1.0) that is open to all museum bloggers. Having all of talk and encouraging cross-linking and more citing by the community would help.
We will be revising our survey in the next few weeks perhaps would could announce such a list at that time? What do you all think?
Long-term it would be great to have a site that would aggregate all of the RSS feeds and create links back to each museum blog. I’d be interested in everyone’s thoughts about this.
Comment by Jim Spadaccini — March 30, 2006 @ 11:39 am
Peter,
There certainly are not many visual art related blog carnivals out there now. I did skim through some of the other art forms the Walker shows.
Carnival of Music
It looks like the link to the newest one is broken but otherwise it published every two weeks.
Carnival of Architects and Urbanists
Just two carnivals under their belt.
Carnival of Creator
This is the only carnival I found that deals mostly with visual arts. It seems to be mostly posts by artists.
Carnival of Literature
This carnival had more commentary than the others which were essentially long lists of links.
carnival of children’s literature
Monthly carnival. This seemed like a specialized sort of carnival to me but the posts i looked at were substantial so I guess it’s going fine.
After looking specifically at the carnivals it looks very familiar. It is essentially like the linkdump posts that bloggers periodically make. Essentially when they build up a lot of links and not much commentary. I see that sort of posting often on popular blogs like Plastic Bag or the Quipsologies series on Speak Up. I guess the difference is that a carnival has submitted articles so a smaller pool of authors. These “linkdump” (aka Free for All) posts are usually not focussed as much as a carnival is.
I thought museums with blogs could start by submitting articles to existing blog carnivals, unfortunately the pickings for what we do are slim, but still it might be an interesting way to start.
Comment by Eric — April 3, 2006 @ 11:18 am
I agree with Jim when he ask to encouraging cross-linking, in my blog I have a list of 63 museums or museums related blog. I visit at least home page of all blogs and their links list and I find that there is lack of convergence.
An idea to improve connection and to be more aware can be to create a museums-blog-ring.
Connecting to Jim consideration in his Blog survey, museums blog are very few and, as I post on 24th march on my blog, in general, there is a LACK OF CULTURE in 99% of web sites where there are arguments tag where you never see “culture”…, for example in Technorati they missing to have a category for Art, Culture and Museums.
I make again the invitation to meet at AAM/Boston to talk about museums blog.
Comment by Mario Bucolo — April 3, 2006 @ 3:59 pm
Hey Mario,
Crossposting is certainly a valuable tool to raise awareness but it obviously has to start with reading whats getting published.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say Technorati is missing categories. I believe all of the Technorati categories are user defined so if it is missing one just tag some posts with that category or update your blog pofile to reflect it. Certainly there are not many Museum blogs so that tag does not show up often, unless your actively searching it out.
Speaking of Technorati and tags though, I’ve always found the nptech tag useful, it’s short for Non-Profit Technology, and used extensively on blogs and on Delicious. I’ve been thinking of using that more but could there a tag that is useful to us for aggregating related posts and links?
Comment by eric — April 4, 2006 @ 8:59 am
Hi Eric, I try to be more clear…sorry for not better explanation.
in technorati example I refer to Featured Categories, like for example categories you will see on the right bar in this page http://www.technorati.com/explore/
Art, Culture…museums are not considered as Featured Categories and this happens in many other place on the web.
Thanks for the info about nptech ;-)
Did you attend AAM conference in Boston?
Comment by Mario Bucolo — April 4, 2006 @ 9:59 am
Although I couldn’t find anything to back my guess up. I was guessing the “featured categories” were just based on popularity of the tags, although on second glance yes there seems to be some editing there.
Sorry none of us are going to AAM, we went to Museums and the Web in Albuquerque and I think one person from our team will be at MCN this year but otherwise one conference a year is about our limit :)
Comment by eric — April 4, 2006 @ 10:31 am
Everyone,
If we went ahead and set up a blog carnival (on a new blog). We’ll (ideum) volunteer to edit it once-a-month. Can we get anyone else commit to a once-a-month commitment? I was thinking we could make the most of the carnival site if we could increase the frequency.
What do you all think?
Comment by Jim Spadaccini — April 4, 2006 @ 3:27 pm
I can cooperate…but some of you must to correct my english ;-)
I also still fight with my server to create a webring that we can use to improve traffic and to better jump from one blog to other.
I hope to setup it very soon and I will put inside the blog that I and Jim collect.
Comment by Mario Bucolo — April 4, 2006 @ 3:34 pm
I think we can vouch for once a month here, pending approval from our department director who is out of town. Where did you set up the carnival?
Comment by eric — April 4, 2006 @ 3:48 pm
Eric,
We haven’t set it up yet but we will soon. As I mentioned, we have the domain museumblogs.org. We are going to host an ongoing list (directory?) of all the museum blogs–but having regular updates and increasing everyone’s authority seems like a good way to go.
Jim
Comment by Jim Spadaccini — April 4, 2006 @ 3:51 pm
ok, it is ready, it work!
the museums blog webring
starting from this home page
http://www.mariobucolo.com/mb/?page_id=112
every one can insert their link and get html code to put in the blog, it appear as the example in my sidebar.
Comment by Mario Bucolo — April 4, 2006 @ 4:53 pm
…please try to make more people aware
thanks
Mario
Comment by Mario Bucolo — April 4, 2006 @ 4:54 pm
Hey Mario,
Not sure how I should be adding our blogs to that mix. I don’t want to flood your blog ring with all of our Walker Blogs, but the front page is not particularly useful for anything besides finding the blog you really want to read.
Comment by eric — April 7, 2006 @ 11:18 am
Eric, you can insert without any problem all your blogs, just take care on how to list, it is conveninet:
Walker..:XXXX blog
or similar.
and add a good description
thanks
mario
Comment by mario bucolo — April 7, 2006 @ 11:21 am
Mario,
I just added the site to the blogring list. I guess I’ve never participated in a Blog Ring or WebRing before so I didn’t know we were supposed to add that HTML navigation to our page.
The NMI team here will have to do some thinking before we start adding features like that to the blogs. Part of our design concept for these blogs was to keep it as stripped down as possible and not add many bells & whistles to the side bar. Anyway it is an interesting way to get more visability for museum blogs, so don’t think we’re ingnoring it. Just thinking things over before making changes to the site.
Comment by eric — April 19, 2006 @ 9:24 am
Hi Eric, I think that at minimum the link to the webring that you insert in your side bar is ok.
In any case you can see how the other 12 blogs as insert the webring code in their blog.
The good thing of a webring is that you can jump from a blog to other as you are in a library and you see different books one near the other. More easy is to go to other book (blog) more advantage is for the community. If you place one book in an aisle and the related one in other aisle or in other floor, it will become difficult.
any way I appreciate your link and I’m happy that your blog is inside the webring
keep in touch
mario
Comment by Mario Bucolo — April 19, 2006 @ 9:32 am