Blog carnivals have been around for years, but a lot of bloggers still don’t know about them. They started in the right-wing political blogosphere as a way to encourage bloggers with similar interests to read/support one another, and it worked very well, but since that’s it’s own world, it took a while to spread to the rest of the blogosphere. Science, nature, and literary bloggers skew left, I think, so we were not among the first non-political bloggers to latch on to the concept. The original blog carnivals were weekly, and the biggest and most popular nature blog carnival, I and the Bird, is bi-weekly, but for the Festival of the Trees, Paul and I couldn’t see having editions more frequently than once a month, and most of the other nature blog carnivals have done the same.

Blog carnivals have been compared to magazines with ever-shifting venues and dispersed contents, but one big difference is that hosts aren’t expected to exercise tight editorial control over content: everything that fits the guidelines may be included, even if the photos are a little fuzzy and the writing isn’t perfect. The emphasis is on participation and enthusiasm for the subject matter, and it’s assumed that readers are capable of deciding for themselves what’s good and what isn’t. Hosts can be proactive and search for relevant posts and other online material that wasn’t submitted in order to round out his/her edition. (Hmm, I should recycle some of this into the About page, shouldn’t I?)

In-depth knowledge isn’t a requirement at all, just enthusiasm and a reasonable facility with language, which you obviously have. It helps to budget a little extra time to search for additional links besides the ones that people submit over the course of the month, or just be alert and snag things as they go by. This morning, for example, I got a great link to an article in the New York Times about a forester/architect who builds with whole trees and harvests with the interests of the whole forest in mind. I am also trying a new approach, for me, that should avoid the mad rush at the end of the month: starting a draft post and adding write-ups for each new link as it comes in. (Given how wordy I am, this practically guarantees that the final post will be 2000 words long!)

But here’s another problem, I think: serious nature people often tend to be loners, a bit, too. I know I am. So that makes the ordinary, bloggy and networky things like commenting on and linking to each others posts a little less regular than elsewhere on the web, where, as you point out, memes like Photo Friday and Wordless Wednesday attract hundreds if not thousands of participants.

Thanks a lot for the introduction! Beautiful… I am very happy with this festival, hope everyone can enjoy it!!!

Best for you all, from a brazilian tree hugger

Juliana