Those Infernal Blog Carnivals Again
525 words.
If you’ve been paying attention to the Virginia blogosphere, you know that my thoughts a while back on the Virginia Blog Carnival have been mischaracterized as an attack, a complaint, and even “whinage” by various blogs in the last week or so. None of that bothered me-that’s the nature of partisan bloggers, after all. But then I stumbled upon this exchange in the comments of The Richmond Democrat:
I’m Not Emeril: When you say “None of the individuals who complained about this alleged ’tilt’ bothered to submit to my carnival.” are you referring to your comrades F.T. and Krehbiel?"
Richmond Democrat: I think my post says everything that needs to be said INE.
This is an outrage! Richmond Democrat is definitely NOT my comrade! But seriously, I don’t even read RD unless it appears in an aggregator or someone else references it. RD’s blogging style generally doesn’t appeal to me. (It’s probably not wise to say anything more without an attorney present.)
It’s true that I didn’t submit anything for RD’s short-lived carnival, and I haven’t submitted anything for the regular carnival. The short reason is that I haven’t written anything lately that I find particularly noteworthy. But even if I had written something grand, I probably wouldn’t have submitted it. In my opinion, there are three primary reasons one would submit to a blog carnival: 1) Publicity, 2) Vanity, and 3) Social networking. I don’t need publicity and, being a recluse by nature, I don’t particularly like social networking. I’ll admit to a certain amount of vanity (or maybe it’s hubris), but I try not to show that too much in public.
But even if I felt vain enough to submit a post, and I had a post I felt was good enough to submit, I probably still wouldn’t submit to a blog carnival. (I can hear the gasps of incredulity all the way from here.) It goes back to what I said before in a comment: “I don’t submit to blog carnivals because I realize it’s a lot of work to host them and I’m too lazy to get involved in that.” It’s not that I’m too lazy to submit posts, as some people inferred, it’s that I’m too lazy to host a carnival. (By the way, I think of it more as an acknowledgement of my limitations than laziness. :) Why would I be thinking about hosting at all? Well, to me, if one submits to a blog carnival, it implies volunteering to host a future carnival. Blog carnivals offer a great deal of publicity for smaller blogs, so it’s polite to offer something in exchange. If one sent posts to blog carnivals but refused to host one, that would be lame. Sort of like complaining about the rules of a popular, free aggregator service.
So that’s why I’m personally not doing blog carnivals. Maybe someday in the future I’ll want more publicity (I do actually have some future blog ideas), but at this point in my blogging “career,” it’s just not a high priority.
Thomas Krehbiel writes The Krehbiel Strikes Back, a generally centrist commentary on news, media, politics, and culture.
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