Carnival Hosting? No thank you!
I had forgotten that I had volunteered to host the Carnival of Personal Finance, in April 2010, so when I got the e-mail from the Carnival owner I was surprised and a little panicked as well.
I have already written a post for Monday about Family Day in Ontario. After taking a few minutes to think, I came up with the concept of writing this week’s CPF in a Family Advice format. Thus was born:
Carnival Of Personal Finance #192: The Family Day Edition
I always valued advice from my family, and from what I had heard from other folks there was always an inherent value in advice from different family members, so I went with that.
I looked at how many entries had been submitted for the Carnival (it is a weekly Carnival), and there were almost 100 of them, which again made me go Holy Crap (just reading all of this was going to take a while).
The Carnival itself has a set of rules for posting to the Carnival which helped trim out some of the entries up front (I’d say about 10-20%). Some posts, you would tell, were simply “factory” posts from sites that pump out content with very little personal input.
I started trimming and was looking for specific personal finance/family-type posts, which started knocking out a lot of entries. Finally, I ended up with about 30 entries that I was going to use. I managed to write them in a reasonable (if rushed) format and add a few pictures from the Ontario Government’s Family Day website as well.
Carnival Hosting Backlash
Normally when I have submitted to Carnivals and not been included, I have simply gone, “Oh well…”, and moved on, but evidently that is not the “norm” when it comes to other Financial Bloggers.
One sent me a “short” note asking why I didn’t include the post, and I have been receiving “snippy” comments as well from other bloggers about my edit’ing techniques.
I didn’t want to publish a “here is a list of interesting posts” Carnival (I do that enough on Fridays, and frankly it is a very lazy blogging trick), I wanted it to make sense and be concise (so that someone might actually go through all the posts, not just the first few).
The Day After
Not sure what hosting this Carnival will do for my site. It didn’t really increase my traffic that much (it was a good day, but not the best day). Hopefully I have picked up a few more readers and maybe picked up a few more incoming links, we shall see.
Epilogue: Carnivals didn’t do much for me, and now I have to keep cleaning up broken links from sites that keep disappearing.