Recently I have been thinking about the use of blog carnivals. Do they get read by enough people to be considered useful? Do the people who read them actually click through to blog posts they wouldn't have otherwise? Presumably people who read carnivals regularly read a number of blogs regularly, too. So does the carnival add anything for these readers? And what about people who aren't regular readers of featured blogs? Are there any? Do people who don't usually read about the subject matter learn about it through carnivals?
Read more at Carnival of Evolution.
Sometimes it happens that I consider a certain blog not interesting enough for me to be a regular reader, then a carnival directs me to a particularly interesting post in that blog (which at that point, I might reconsider adding to feeds I track).
ReplyDeleteSince there are way more blogs than I can reasonably follow at this point, carnivals can help put posts relevant to a certain topic in one place; for example, if an ecology blog occasionally mentions evolution but is quite far from any of my other secondary interests, I'm not very likely to follow it (even if it's in Reader – would be a full time job just to keep up!), but can still get relevant posts I'm interested in that way. It also helps be read if you don't typically blog about a certain topic. I do wonder though if people who follow carnivals are usually bloggers themselves anyway...
ReplyDeleteMeh, regardless, it's fun! =D