A Consuming Experience

A blog carnival is a good way for bloggers who write on the same general subject (anything from arts, health and politics to humour, science, technology etc) to help each other out. The idea is that each "edition" of the carnival is "hosted" by a different blogger, who receives submissions of posts from other bloggers, then pulls their personal selection of the best submissions together into a single post published on their own blog, with links.

That way the submitters benefit from extra publicity and links to their posts, and also the host's associated summaries of their posts, on the host's blog. People take it in turns to host, and internet search engines generally count carnival links for ranking purposes, even those (like Wikio) which ignore links in blogrolls.

I first heard about Carnival of the Mobilists from Vero at mobileCampLondon2007. As you'd expect, it's a carnival intended for bloggers who write about mobile phones, cellphones, the mobile space generally. While I don't specialise in mobile, I do often write about mobile-related matters (my posts on LG phones are consistently in ACE's top 5 or 10 most popular posts).

I submitted a post (my mobileCamp write-up, in fact) to the carnival, and Steve Litchfield kindly included it in The Smartphones Show's Carnival of the Mobilists #95. But - mea culpa (=my bad!) - I hadn't checked the rules of this carnival properly, because I'd tracked it down through this page or something like it, so I hadn't seen the rule that if your post gets listed in a Mobilist carnival host's post, you're supposed to link to the host's post and promote the carnival on your own site or blog that week - or you'll be universally hated by all! I just didn't link to the Carnival post that time because I hadn't cottoned on to that rule, so I'm trying to make up for it by linking to it now, albeit very belatedly.

I missed the deadline for a later submission to this Carnival (initial thoughts / review of 3's Huawei mobile broadband USB modem / dongles) and it didn't get selected by the following week's host - possibly because I was still universally hated then, or maybe because there's some kind of unwritten rule I've still not found that says only posts published in the current calendar week are eligible.

But perhaps I've finally been forgiven, because my review of the UrbanTool hipHolster for mobiles/gadgets (verdict: don't waste your money) has been selected for this week's Carnival of the Mobilists #127 at WapReview. So here I am, dedicating a post to help promote the carnival, with links to the host's post!

For this particular carnival, you're only allowed to offer to be a host if your entries have been selected for the carnival at least 3 times before.

But anyone can submit a post about things mobile to this carnival by emailing mobilists@gmail.com before midnight PST on Friday (for posts written earlier that same week only, I assume), so if you've written on a mobile / wireless communications topic and you'd like to join in, do just go ahead and submit your post and help both yourself and your fellow bloggers.

Labels: blogs, internet, mobile, publicity

A Consuming Experience (or ACE, as Kirk often calls this blog for short) is now syndicated through Newstex's Blogs on Demand, whose content is taken by services such as LexisNexis, with whom they've won blog aggregation awards.

Hence the new Newstex button in my sidebar.

ACE is part of Newstex's technology blogs stable, which includes such tech blog luminaries as Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Techdirt and Valleywag, and I'm delighted that ACE will be joining such illustrious company.

Thanks to all of my readers for your support!

Labels: publicity

I know a lot of people who visit here are MyBlogLog members, from the turnover in the "Recent Readers" section of my blog sidebar.

So, in case you've not seen it yet, the MyBlogLog blog mentions that Yahoo! News are "profiling people behind the keyboards--fascinating people of the web. That could be you. In order for Yahoo! News to consider profiling you as a POTW [person of the web], you must maintain an interesting web site with some social significance, good or bad." I like the "good or bad"...!

To add yourself to the list of people they might profile, join MyBlogLog (if you haven't already), login there, and then go visit http://potw.news.yahoo.com/. What a clever way to get people to sign up for MyBlogLog.

I've also noticed that, tucked away at the bottom of that page, there's a link to a Yahoo People of the Web Feedback Form where you can also submit some details of yourself (or I guess some story you want featured) if "you run a website you think we should feature? Do you know of a great story about the web you think we should follow up on?". (Interestingly I also see a link on that page to Yahoo! POTW but it doesn't seem to be working yet.)

So what are you waiting for? If you want to promote your blog or yourself, go forth and (maybe) be famous!

Labels: publicity, Yahoo