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September 6, 2007
Carnival Post-mortem
Over all, I think Biblical Studies Carnival XXI was well received. I want to thank everyone for his or her kind comments and links to the Carnival. I don't have exact numbers but I think the carnival had over one hundred visitors every day from Saturday until yesterday. It looks like traffic will be somewhat lower today.
However, I am afraid that I may have left some with the wrong impression. Matt Page at Bible Films Blog reported the following:
There's been a couple of months recently when carnival hosts have (rightly) bemoaned a lack of nominations, so it's good to see that Duane had enough material that he had to leave some of it out.
I suppose this was in reaction to my thanking people for their nominations and my saying that I did make decisions with regard to the content of the Carnival. The two comments, while physically near each other, were not otherwise closely related in my thinking. First, I did and do want to thank all those who nominated posts for the carnival. I did in fact decide to exclude a couple of these suggestions because I didn't think the met the "academic" criterion of the Carnival. Second, I doubt that 25% of the entries in they roundup were directly from nominations. The majority of entries I tracked down myself. However, nominators often helped in that process. They led me, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, to related blogs that I didn't know about or hadn't visited. So, each nomination had a kind of multiplying factor that increased its value.
Various people approach the task of hosting a Carnival in various ways. If anyone cares, here is how I did it. I started collecting posts on August 1, the first day of the roundup cycle. I put together the basic structure over the weekend of August 4-5. I knew that my workload from my part time job would increase significantly by mid month and continue so throughout the month. I didn't want to have a crunch at the end. Every time I saw something interesting or got a nomination, I bookmarked it right then and added it to the ever-growing roundup draft as soon as I could, often immediately. From about August 5 on, there wasn’t more than two or three days in a row that I couldn’t have published a "month to date" roundup in less than an hour. On a couple of occasions, I went through the list of biblioblogs at, how do I say it, oh, Biblioblogs.com. Once I got going, I found it fun and looking for good material almost every day, even if I only spent 10 or 15 minutes beyond my normal blog reading, became a kind of exciting challenge.
The relatively small number of nominations was not my greatest disappointment; I expected that. My biggest disappointment was that I couldn't find more posts from people who sometimes write exciting, learned things about the Bible and cognate matters but, like me, are not strictly (or in anyway) bibiobloggers. Sometimes there are many such posts. But I could only find one that fit the criteria of the Biblical Studies Carnivals for the month of August.
Future Carnival hosts should take a look at the work of John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts and CFeagans at Hot Cup of Joe who often write insightfully and authoritively about various topics relating to the Bible and cognate studies, but not in August. The same is true of several of the contributors to Language Log. Christopher O'Brien, who did have a post featured in this month's carnival, over at Northstate Science very often has insightful things to say about “biblical” archaeology and closely related issues. And there are others.
Posted by Duane Smith at September 6, 2007 7:48 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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