Please Post About the Carnival of Bent Attractions
Please post about the Carnival of Bent Attractions on your blog to help us get as many submissions as possible. The carnival needs submissions to keep coming in each month to stay alive!
The next Carnival of Bent Attractions will be over at Jay Sennett’s blog on April 10th. Submissions are due by 12:01AM on April 2nd.
OK. Since you are so clear about this request, I will do so; however, first I must confess why I’ve not done so to this point. Frankly, I do not understand what “carnivals” are, or how they work. Also, I’ve never felt like anything I wrote was something that I would want to circulate beyond my own limited readership. So, I’m going to plunge in and post about this (tomorrow) and I’ll contribute a post. I only hope I don’t embarrass myself! :)
Here is the Wikipedia definition of Blog Carnivals:
Blog carnival
A blog article that contains links to other articles covering a specific topic. Most blog carnivals are hosted by a rotating list of frequent contributors to the carnival, and serve to both generate new posts by contributors and highlight new bloggers posting matter in that subject area.
The idea of CBA is to spotlight blog posts on articles of interest to the gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, trans and queer communities. It allows participating blogs to extend their support and readers to new blogs, helps existing blogs gain new visitors and generally brings good posts that otherwise might have languished in obscurity out to a broader audience.
Working together, blog carnival participants can extend their reach, influence and audience. While there are some lingering issues with them, when they’re done respectfully and thoughtfully, they can be a wonderful reader service. I’ve found a lot of great blogs via CBA – I hope to see it continue to flourish.
I guess I should have posted the email I sent to Denise explaining carnivals here for others who may not know much about them, huh? Here it is:
Carnivals are like intros you see at the beginning of anthologies, where the editor often says a little about each of the stories you are about to read – except carnivals are done with blog posts instead.
It’s kinda like if you were to publish a post of links to other blog posts you found interesting, but carnival hosts rely on submissions to link to.
…
There’s also a FAQ page at BlogCarnival.com, which explains blog carnivals like 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.
There is so much stuff in the blog-o-sphere, just finding interesting stuff is hard. If there is a carnival for a topic you are interested in, following that carnival is a great way to learn what bloggers are saying about that topic. If you are blogging on that topic, the carnival is the place to share your work with like-minded bloggers.
Blog Carnival is the place to come to find carnivals you are interested in, to submit your blog articles to carnivals where they belong, and to organize and maintain carnivals.”
Denise wrote: “I’ve never felt like anything I wrote was something that I would want to circulate beyond my own limited readership.”
Denise, are you afraid of someone taking something you said out of context when it is listed in the carnival?