Having complained at some length about how the Philosophia Naturalis blog carnival seemed to have died, I am pleased to report that another installment has arisen. Volunteers are needed to host the next edition (sign up before Christmas).
Before you ask, “If you complain so much, why don’t you put that energy into hosting one yourself,” let me say that I’d be happy to run one of these shindigs, but given all the other blog-related stuff I’ve somehow committed myself to doing, you’d better not ask until mid-January. Lay a guilt trip on me the next time ’round.
I’m also curious if anyone has ideas for a different way to get multiple science bloggers to collaborate. I mean, a blog carnival isn’t much of a “collaboration” — it’s all retrospective, put together by somebody who’s more a secretary reading the minutes than an editor. Cosmic Variance recently had an open thread for cosmology questions, and Aaron Bergman did a similar thing for string theory. I wonder if this could be made into a regular affair, sort of an “Ask Professor Science!†tradition in which each month (or every N days, whatever) a different scientist-blogger hosts an open thread. If the event were well-advertised, each occasion could easily attract informed responses from many scientists other than the host, too.
There’s another carnival which is still alive and kicking!
I sort of like that idea. A sort of backwards blog carnival, where instead of one blog pointing to lots and lots of articles, have lots and lots of blogs point to and discuss the same featured article. It, first of all, would allow there to be a lot more focus on promoting great work while at the same time could happen much, much more often than your average carnival.
So who decides which article everybody has to point to? And who decides who is to be so honored? I hate to be so cynical — okay, I love it — but what you’re suggesting is a giant popularity contest that the likes of pharyngula would win every time rather than highlighting content (and content providers) that readers may not have already seen, which is the point of a carnival.
I’m not sure Mr. Bad and I are discussing the same thing. My idea was to have an open thread, hosted at regular intervals (say, monthly) at physical-science blogs which volunteer for the task. People ask questions in the comments and get answers from the blog host, along with any of the other suave physicists who stop by. This would highlight new content providers the same way a carnival does.
You can do blog carnivals in that sort of vein as well, by declaring an overarching theme beforehand. We can hardly claim to have thought of it, but us in the geoblogosphere are having some success with this approach in our own carnival, despite being relatively few in number…