Welcome to the Friday, August 17, 2007 edition of On the Moneyed Midways, the only weekly review of the best posts from the most recent editions of the best of the world of business and money-related blog carnivals!
Something happened to the Carnival of Real Estate sometime in the past two weeks, as it appears to have pretty much died. The last edition was posted back on August 6th, but we haven't found any other editions since, nor can we find any future hosts.
Since this particular carnival has produced some of the best posts we've seen this year, we decided to go looking for it. What we found, in effect, is that the carnival pretty much committed suicide following a coup d'etat. From Greg Swann at BloodhoundBlog, who launched the rebellion:
[The Carnival of Real Estate] is up at RealEstateUndressed. Host Larry Cragun got around our having broken the rules on entries by breaking all the rules. In consequence, this week there will be two consumer-focused real estate carnivals and no Carnival of Real Estate.
In a nutshell, the Carnival of Real Estate was intended from the outset to focus on top-notch posts written about the business of real estate itself, rather than the consumer side of the business. Over time, the blog carnival drifted away from its charter, which may have effectively killed it. Greg Swann describes the problem:
I’m pretty fed up with the Carnival of Real Estate. It is what it is, and there have been times over the past year when it has blown tender kisses toward the sublime. But much too often it has chosen to rut around in the mud, and, in any case, it is much too much of everything to be anything at all.
This is not good.
From reading as many blog carnivals as we do, we know that this kind of drift is a spreading problem. In fact, our long-running favorite, the Carnival of the Capitalists, went through something like a re-boot earlier this year to specifically address the situation, and it's one of the most broadly-based carnivals in the blogosphere.
At some point, a blog carnival becomes not worth reading simply because it just becomes a collection of links, rather than a well-considered collection that's been assembled with care and attention by the week's host. We can create a collection of links revolving around a common topic using a search engine. We don't need an actual person to do it if they're not going to exercise any discipline or editorial judgment, nor if they're not going to provide any indication of why a contributed post has been included or even a description of what it's about in their own words.
So, what to do? Gregg Swann is adapting the solution we adopted when we launched OMM - create a ongoing carnival that's tightly focused on topic, edited consistently by one or just a few people, that features the best posts of the week (in his case, focused on the world of the real estate business.) We've featured the result, the Odysseus Medal Awards for Real Estate Weblogging in place of the Carnival of Real Estate for our edition of OMM this week.
That, and all the best posts we found in the week that was await you below....
| On the Moneyed Midways for August 17, 2007 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Carnival | Post | Blog | Comments |
| Blogging About ERISA Carnival | Benefits Among Those Issues That Need to Be Addressed Up Front in Sale of a Business | Retirement Plan Blog | Jerry Kalish identifies the questions that the prospective buyers of a business need to address before committing to the deal. |
| Carnival of Game Production | The Five Best Business Video Games of All Time | AllBusiness | Tim Devaney observes that you can learn a lot of useful skills from video games and offers a short list of five that can teach you something about the world of business! |
| Carnival of Money Stories | How Money Can Change a Life | Money Smart Life | Absolutely essential reading that begins by asking "What would you say to a drug dealer who asked to bum a cigarette?" |
| Carnival of the Capitalists | We've All Caught the Detroit Disease | Trusted Advisor | Charles H. Green believes we've learned the wrong lessons from Detroit. Absolutely essential reading! |
| Cavalcade of Risk | The Bear Turns Global | SOX First | What had been a problem with subprime home loans in the U.S. has gone global, as Leon Gettler reports on indications that sentiments of future economic performance are growing more gloomy. |
| Festival of Stocks | Dividend Analysis; Citigroup (NYSE: C) | Dividends Matter | Does the recent carnage among financial and bank stocks represent an opportunity to buy a high dividend-yielding stock at a discount? Average Joe's analysis suggests the answer may be yes. |
| Odysseus Medal (Real Estate) | The Innovator's Dilemma in Real Estate: Beware of That Redfin Swimming Just Below You | 3 Oceans Real Estate | Kevin Boer not only won the inaugural Odysseus Medal competition, he's written The Best Post of the Week, Anywhere!, in a post about how Redfin's innovation may well redefine the future of the real estate industry. |
| Small Business Issues | Training the Aging Workforce | SharpBrains | Alvaro Fernandez has been thinking about what it will mean for your business when the baby boomers begin retiring en-masse. |
Previous Editions
- OMM's Running Index for 2007
- The Best Blogs Found in 2006 (and our full 2006 index)!
Labels: carnival
- posted by Ironman at 8:03 AM | Permalink | |
