Volunteer to Host

Thanks for your interest in the Festival of the Trees. If you’d like to volunteer to host, use the contact form, or write to us individually or in combination. Dave: bontasaurus (at) yahoo (dot) com, Pablo: paul (at) roundrockjournal (dot) com, and Jade: trees (at) brainripples (dot) com.

How does it work?

Hosting the Festival of the Trees at your blog isn’t difficult, but it is a lot of work. The only technical skills required are a basic command of good English and the ability to find, copy and paste permalinks. Your blog need not be specifically nature-oriented to qualify. As long as it’s literate, noncommercial, and not obscene or otherwise inappropriate, we’ll probably O.K. it. We want the festival to reach as many different blogging communities as possible, so diversity among blog hosts is a good thing.

Hosts are also sole editors of their editions. You should be prepared to spend somewhere in excess of ten hours, at minimum, reading submissions, scanning through the blogs of past participants, and assembling a festival post. Rewards include a lot of incoming links, new readers, and the opportunity to explore a number of sites and learn about a number of things you might otherwise never encounter.

You’ll need an email address we can publicize, but if you prefer to maintain your privacy and don’t want to open a new account, we’ll give you the use of a dedicated email account for the month.

Guidelines

We’re kind of laid back here compared with some other blog carnivals. For one thing, we do not expect that every link featured in a Festival of the Trees edition will be to a blog; other tree-related web pages, such as Flickr photo sets, are also welcome, as long as they haven’t been featured in past editions. (See the About page for more of our general philosophy on what to include.) Second, while we expect that most blog posts linked to in a given edition will date from the previous month, this is not an iron-clad rule. A few older blog posts are welcome, too — again, as long as they haven’t been featured before.

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 or 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 wonderful and what’s maybe just worth a “Huh.”

Many blog carnivals consist entirely of links submitted by the authors. That’s not been the pattern at the Festival of the Trees. We as festival coordinators try and keep our eyes open for interesting tree-related material to forward to the host/editor of the upcoming festival, and we encourage other fans of the festival to do likewise. Quite often, the authors themselves don’t know about the festival, or if they do, don’t remember to forward their links. For that reason, too, most if not all festival hosts to date have supplemented whatever links have been submitted with things they’ve found on their own.

For the festival post itself, there’s no one best way to put it together. We encourage hosts to familiarize themselves with past editions, and also to look at other nature- and science-related blog carnivals, such as I and the Bird and Circus of the Spineless, for inspiration. If you’re a scientist, perhaps you’ll end up organizing material by species, in phylogenetic order. If you’re a poet, maybe you’ll want to write the entire post in blank verse. We encourage creativity. Surprise us!