Welcome to the March 9, 2007 newly improved and streamlined edition of On the Moneyed Midways, the only weekly review of the best business and money-related posts from each of the week's major blog carnivals! We seek out the best posts from among the hundreds posted to the various blog carnivals posted each week and we select one post as being The Best Post of the Week, Anywhere!^(TM) As an added bonus, we also cite the near contenders for the best post of the week as being Absolutely essential reading!^(TM)

It turns out that our blog carnival experiment wasn't toast. Our findings are not encouraging for bloggers: with few exceptions, submitting posts to a blog carnival doesn't provide the boost in site traffic that it did just one year ago, and dramatically less than it did two years ago.

In our experiment, we submitted 20 unique, on-topic posts to 20 blog carnivals several weeks ago, which have now all played out. In making our selection of which posts to contribute, we chose from among our most popular posts of recent months - opting in many cases to submit those that we had already established from our site traffic would draw attention and ideally, additional traffic from being posted in a blog carnival focused on a closely related topic.

The results were, in a word, disappointing. As we've come to suspect, the proliferation of blog carnivals and particularly those whose host of the week makes extensive use of the post submission content that is automatically generated through Blog Carnival's submission form turned out to not have been worth the minimal time or effort of submitting.

Instead, we confirmed that the blog carnivals whose hosts who make the effort to both read and describe the posts submitted deliver more traffic. The best example of the beneficial effect of actual review, editing and commentary by the host came from last week's Carnival of the Capitalists - one of the oldest blog carnivals and still one of the best for individual bloggers hoping to attract readers. The CotC has a dedicated submission form for bloggers to submit contributions.

As a result of what we verified in our experiment, we're changing how we select posts from each of the week's business, career, economics and otherwise money-related blog carnivals to primarily draw from those carnivals whose host has made a decisive contribution to the quality of the carnival.

The best posts of the week that was, from the best hosted carnivals of the past week, awaits below....

On the Moneyed Midways for March 09, 2007
Carnival	Post	Blog	Comments
Carnival of Debt Reduction	Skipping EVEN MORE Nickels and Dimes for Bigger Savings	Wisdom from Wenchypoo's Mental Wastebasket	Wenchypoo provides a long list of neat money-saving ideas and resources - lots of things to consider in better controlling your personal cost of living while improving your standard of living!
Carnival of Entrepreneurs	The Coin Man - Pay for Your College Education with Other People's Change	Personal Finance Advice	Jeffrey Strain tells the story of a friend with a remarkable business: he goes to people's houses, counts their coins and exchanges them for paper money, all for a $5 fee. But he makes much more money per house than that small fee doing it! Hands down, The Best Post of the Week, Anywhere!
Carnival of Entrepreneurs	Imagineering: Engineering Your Imagination Down to Earth	Emmanuel Oluwatosin: Inspiring Excellence, Realising Ambitions	Emmanuel Oluwatosin discusses the impact of your thought patterns upon who you become and offers the best advice of the week: if you want to be a winner in control of your thoughts, don't start your day by reading newspapers!
Carnival of Leadership Growth	Seductive Statistics	Trusted Advisor	Charles H. Green evaluates the findings of Edelman's annual trust survey, and the potential pitfalls of measuring levels of trust rather than earning it.
Carnival of Personal Development	Calculated Risk Becomes Calculated Reality	Success from the Nest	Tony D. Clark shows how to go from determining how much risk you have in pursuing a goal to calculating how to make your goal your reality.
Carnival of Personal Development	The Art of Completion	Renovate Your Life with Craig	Craig Harper provides Absolutely essential reading in examining the role that our inability to finish what we start has in creating the biggest obstacle to achieving forever results.
Carnival of Real Estate	Cheat the Prophet	Transparent Real Estate	Pat Kitano champions those who stir things up for no reason other than to shake up the status quo, and redefine reality in the meantime. And yes, it's about Real Estate!
Carnival of Taxes	Traditional versus Roth Tax-Advantaged Plan Contributions	The Skilled Investor	The Skilled Investor offers a wealth of information on the comparable advantages and disadvantages of traditional and Roth IRAs, coming down strongly in favor of the traditional IRA for "typical" investors.
Carnival of the Capitalists	Light Bulbs -- The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly	Photon Courier	David Foster looks at GE's announcement that it will introduce new, high efficiency incandescent light bulbs by 2010 and wonders how lawmakers seeking to "ban the bulb" will react. One more thing - since David's post is part of an archive page, we strongly recommend you scroll down for "Two School Systems -- And Two Foundries", as well as the other posts.
Economics and Social Policy	Word of the Day	The Boring Made Dull	Boringmadedull trumpets the word "e-pocrisy" in describing the self-serving and all-in-one Baptist-and-Bootlegger antics and related ethical misadventures of a former Vice-President.
Festival of Stocks	The Challenge of All Bad Choices - Selecting 401(k) Options with Merrill Lynch	makingourway	What if your company had a 401(k) plan, and all of the investment choices were lousy? Makingourway slogs through the available options to make the best of a bad situation.

Previous Editions

• OMM's Running Index for 2007
• The Best Blogs Found in 2006 (and our full 2006 index)!

Labels: carnival

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