Welcome to the Friday, January 18, 2008 edition of On the Moneyed Midways, featuring the best posts from the past week as found in the week's best business and money-related blog carnivals!

The big news this week from the world of blog carnivals is that the oldest business and money-related blog carnival, the Carnival of the Capitalists is going to go through its second major reboot. Here's what blog carnival pioneer Jay Solo had to say about the new direction for the CotC in this week's edition:

Blog carnivals as a concept are dead. They have been for a while. Horse flesh seldom looked so tenderized. I had planned to write a post detailing why I say that, and still do. As such, it’s become clear that Carnival of the Capitalists cannot continue as it has; as a topical blog carnival in the traditional definition I largely originated.

Sure, now it’s a brand. Not as positive or well-known a brand as it ought to be, but worth keeping. So how do you create something called Carnival of the Capitalists, keep the best of what that was supposed to but couldn’t be as a more or less "crowd sourced" meme, then improve it and add value from there?

As it happens, Jay's solution is very similar to the one we adopted back in 2006 when we originally launched On the Moneyed Midways:

Carnival of the Capitalists will be a weekly post on bizosphere.com, where there may be some number of other posts, no longer mainly administrative. While retaining the name, there will be no pretense of being a blog carnival under the old definition, which many so-called carnivals didn’t adhere to in the first place.

It will seek to include a set of links to especially compelling recent blog posts on business and economics topics.

It will attempt to build on the idea there are good posts that few will ever see, out there on random blogs few will ever hear of, and that it's good for the blogosphere to bring them to the attention of more people, including people who might not do much blog reading. Not that posts from better known blogs will be excluded out of hand, but the same people being in CotC every week, with posts good, bad or indifferent, runs counter to Rob's original idea of discovery.

Jay goes on to outline the major reasons for the CotC changes, which we've largely validated through our own experience and deliberate experimentation over the course of the past couple of years, and concludes with the final edition of the CotC as we have known it.

For perhaps a preview of what to expect from the new vision of the CotC, we here at OMM are pleased to present the best posts from our survey of the best of the blogosphere's business and money-related blog carnivals from the past week that was, all waiting for you below....

On the Moneyed Midways for January 18, 2008
Carnival	Post	Blog	Comments
Carnival of Debt Reduction	Cash Only Spending Experiment Analysis	The Happy Rock	Debt-guru Dave Ramsey says that you can save 12 to 18% by only spending cash, but The Happy Rock failed after a month because it was such a radical change in his spending habits (and a real hassle to track.)
Carnival of Personal Finance	True Diversification	brip blap	Have you ever really considered the full spectrum of ways in which you can diversify your investments? brip blap's intriguing post is Absolutely essential reading!
Carnival of Personal Finance	How I Taught My Preschooler the Value of a Dollar	BeingFrugal.net	Teaching young kids about money and the value of saving is a tough job - Being Frugal's post provides a practical guide to making it easier!
Carnival of Real Estate	How Much Will My Credit Score Cost Me on My Next Mortgage?	John Barker's Mortgage Blog	John Barker puts real numbers to the credit crunch coming down the pike for prospective homebuyers with low credit scores. The bad news? If your FICO score is under 680, you'll be paying more, and the lower you are, the more you'll pay.
Carnival of Taxes	Congress patches Alternative Minimum Tax	Fundmastery	Kurt Brouwer finds abundant irony in the machinations the U.S. Congress went through on its way to preventing upper middle class taxpayers from having to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax for another year.
Carnival of the Capitalists	Hire People that Are Better Than You	Small Business Essentials	Trust, quality, fresh perspectives, greater options, efficiency and cost savings are the reasons Nikole provides in explaining why you as the boss should seek out employees who exceed your abilities. The Best Post of the Week, Anywhere!
Cavalcade of Risk	Retail Clinics Versus Public Hospitals	The Physician Executive	Absolutely essential reading! Zagreus Ammon notes in a very multi-dimensional post that there are contradictory forces with regard to competition in providing health care in communities: "In the case of MinuteClinics, competition harms the public health. In the case of public and county hospitals, the lack of competition is at the root of the problem."
Economics and Social Policy	Barack Obama Has Most Sensible Housing Plan	Salt Lake Real Estate Blog	Nigel Swaby considers the actions taken by the government to date in dealing with the building housing crisis (pun intended on our part!), and the proposals put forth by the Democratic Party contenders for president, finding that Barack Obama is the only one headed in the right direction!
Festival of Frugality	The Line Between Frugal and Cheap	Little Dough Girl	The Little Dough Girl considers where to draw the line in writing the 10 commandments of being frugal (not cheap). Attention freegans: print this out and take this list, and the spirit behind it, with you everywhere!
Festival of Stocks	Roger That	Dividend Money	Tyler is excited that Toronto-based Rogers Communications (RCI) is doubling its annual dividend and buying back shares on increased strength of its business.
Odysseus Medal (Real Estate)	Zillow News: Upside-down and Dumb Like a Fox	The San Diego Home Blog	Kris Berg considers the implications of Zillow's revealed business model, in which they're effectively creating a MySpace for your home, focused on building trust with customers through social networking and transparency. Absolutely essential reading!

Previous Editions

• OMM's Running Index for 2008
• OMM's Running Index for 2007
• The Best Blogs Found in 2006 (and our full 2006 index)!

Labels: carnival

- posted by Ironman at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Home |