It’s Dead Jim

So.  Carnival of the Vanities is finally closing its blogverbial doors.  The horse is dead.  Long flog the horse.

James Joyner picked up the news, leading to a comment by Dean, which led to a post by Dean.  James believe carnivals in general are outdated.  Dean disagrees, but sees Carnival of the Vanities as having been too generic.  I commented with my thoughts on the matter:

This is the historical significance of Carnival of the Capitalists; spawning the concept of niche carnivals, prompting the common use of “carnival” in the names, establishing the practice of a special e-mail address and a home page for info on the carnival, and firming up the definition of what is a carnival.  It showed that a niche carnival could become significant, even more popular than the original, and ultimately attract a higher level of quality. 

People still use it as an obligatory thing, entering any old post that they can just for the link whorage, but it’s not that bad.

The sad thing is that with my hours of work a week, week in and week out for just under three years, about the time I started trying to figure out how to monetize it a little, Blog Carnival came along and monetized all of them for someone who barely had a clue what a carnival was but had a relative who could instapimp the ride for him.  That is the way in which carnivals have perhaps jumped the shark.  There’s someone there with a stake and an enabling influence to ensure that an absurd degree of nicheness happens.  Do we really need a carnival of nose picking toddlers, carnival of HP camera foibles, carnival of the literature of spider robinson, and that sort of thing?

I’m not even convinced we need carnivals of marketing, entrepreneurship, finance, stocks and whatnot, all of which are already covered by and usually categorized or not that hard to locate within CotC.  All those are is an exercise in maximum linkurbatory satisfaction.  On the other hand, for people with a specific interest, they don’t have to look as hard for that one topic, and have no idea that a few bloggers are in all those sub-niche carnivals regularly just because they can be.

I tend to think of Blog Carnival as an overtly fantastic idea that was the worst thing ever to happen to the carnival concept, and might have been even done differently or by someone else.

Ultimately, though, CotV was indeed doomed by lack of focus, and by inability to be, essentially, a carnival of quality writing.  Even had it become that overnight, readers and linkers wouldn’t have come back.  CotC becomes the oldest and still most popular.

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