Carnival of the Liberals Needs Your Help (and your submissions)

[salvorhardin]

Just a note that Carnival of the Liberals #2 is only a week away and we’ve only received a handful of submissions so far. Hopefully everyone is holding out on me and I’ll receive a ton of submissions at the last minute. That last minute would be by the end of Tuesday in case your’re wondering. Paul from Brainshrub wrote yesterday in e-mail that he had over 1,000 unique visitors for the first edition of CotL. What a great way to expose people to some excellent liberal bloggers they might normally never have found!

This can’t work without you though. If you participated in the first carnival, whether or not your entry was chosen for the first CotL, we need you to help spread the word. Aside from promoting the best liberal blogging, CotL can also be a way to build community among liberal bloggers. The idea here is to generate a conversation, an exchange of ideas, across and between blogs. This is something conservatives do exceptionally well (the very first blog carnival was originated by conservative blog http://silflayhraka.com">Silflay Hraka) and we can learn from their example.

So, I’d like to ask our liberal blogging friends to please post about Carnival of the Liberals on their blogs. Nothing grand or verbose. Just a short note and a link is all that’s needed. Appropriate times to post about CotL are when a new edition is out and in between editions to help drum up submissions. If you do post, it’s helpful if you always link directly to the current edition of CotL as well as the CotL homesite. If the altruistic reasons for doing so aren’t enough, this will also generate a network of links which are likely to increase your ranking on Google and other search engines.

Please don’t think I’m griping. I’m not. The first Carnival of the Liberals was a huge success. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped make it so. You all deserve a round of applause. CotL was literally created from nothing within a timespan of about three weeks. I wouldn’t have thought it could be done but here we are fast approaching the second edition and we’ve lined up hosts three months ahead already.

But isn’t what being a liberal is all about, at least in part, is doing better? I know we can do better and I know you want CotL to be the best blog carnival out there. You can make that happen. Spare CotL a few words and a link or two on your front page.

Note: This was also posted at Neural Gourmet and sent via e-mail to participants in CotL #1.

[displacedtexan]

1. Be sure to check tomorrow's DU Blog Box column!

Carnival Number 1 is absolutely outstanding!

Personally, I hesitate submitting because I write the Blog Box; however, I will spread the word for submissions.

[salvorhardin]

2. Thanks!

Well, I see no problem with you submitting. It's sort of a two way street. We're both the producers and the consumers of the media so naturally we also promote the stuff we find worthwhile.

One qualification, and I don't think I've made this clear. CotL is the only, as far as I know, selective blog carnival out there. In other words, we don't just use all submissions in the carnival. That shouldn't keep people from submitting their stuff though. Since it is almost entirely up to the individual host, and since the host changes with every edition, I think this will allow both the very best liberal writing to be showcased, as well as promote an excellent diversity of opinion. For instance, I'm more likely to gravitate to entries about ideas whereas another host might be more likely to gravitate to pieces with a humorous bent.