Welcome to the Friday, February 29, 2008 edition of On the Moneyed Midways! Each week, OMM reviews the best of the blogosphere's ongoing early social media experiment known as blog carnivals to bring you the best posts we find related to business or money there.
Before we begin this week's edition, we need to get something out of our system....
Die Blog Carnival, die!
Okay, now back to business....
We admit it. We hate Blog Carnival. Here's the three main reasons why we hate it:
- It's slow and clunky.
- It's submission form creates the generic text that we've come to absolutely despise: "SUBMITTED NAME presents SUBMITTED POST TITLE posted at BLOG NAME saying SUBMITTED COMMENT."
- It's utterly obsolete.
Now, the first two items on that list are things that the people behind Blog Carnival could fix if they wanted to, so let's talk about that third reason which explains why they won't: Blog Carnival is obsolete. Once upon a time, Blog Carnival was the only game in town for putting together the early form of social media known as the blog carnival. If you wanted to gather a bunch of recent posts on a related topic together from a bunch of bloggers, the now obsolete Blog Carnival was the 800-pound gorilla on the web that had the tools to do the job.
And then one day, Blog Carnival became utterly obsolete. That was the day that Google's Blog Search became available, which means that all it takes to create something resembling a weekly blog carnival from scratch is a simple search of posts over the past week on a given topic.
Here's an example. Just for fun, we've created what we'll call the "Carnival of Savings." Click here for the latest edition for 2008.
Pretty cool! Not to mention that the content is much better than anything auto-generated by the thoroughly obsolete Blog Carnival. The only weakness of this approach is that it lacks the hand of an editor - someone who can really tell you why reading a particular post might be well worth your scarce time. Speaking of which, here's one of the neater links that came up today when we ran the "Carnival of Savings" search: "Secret" Flights for Better Service and Savings, Peter Greenberg's tips and examples of popular international destinations offered by carriers that you might not have ever predicted would fly the routes!
For an example of why a hand-picked selection of posts can still hold its own in the modern world of the web, just scroll down! The best posts from the best business and money-related blog carnivals edited and posted by humans in the past week await you below....
| On the Moneyed Midways for February 29, 2008 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Carnival | Post | Blog | Comments |
| Carnival of Debt Reduction | How I Got Out of Consumer Debt: The BUDGET | DebtFREE Revolution | Ana and her husband are about to make the last payment for their truck, capping off nearly two years of intensively focusing on getting out of debt altogether! Her secret weapon: making and keeping a budget! |
| Carnival of HR | When Incentives Backfire | Trusted Advisor | Aligning goals and incentives seems like something simple to do, but Charles H. Green explains the potential consequences of not getting them right in The Best Post of the Week, Anywhere! |
| Carnival of Personal Finance | My Sources of Alternative Income and how I Make Them Work for Me | My Two Dollars | Would you like more income? David describes where he's found opportunities to make extra money beyond his day job by building off the things he knows how to do. |
| Carnival of Savings | "Secret" Flights for Better Service and Savings | Peter Greenberg | You didn't think we'd leave this entry from our impromptu Google Blog Search-driven "blog carnival" out, did you? ;-) |
| Carnival of Taxes | Want to Get Out of Paying Taxes? Don't Try These Excuses! | Fraud Files | Tracy Coenan offers a Top Ten list of totally false excuses that will keep you out of trouble with the IRS! |
| Carnival of the Capitalists | What Every Manager can Learn from Barack Obama | Great Management | Andrew Rondeau isn't endorsing Barack Obama, but he is impressed with the management skills he's demonstrated throughout his campaign to win the nomination to be the Democratic Party's candidate for U.S. President. |
| Cavalcade of Risk | Usually, It's Cheaper to pay than to Go to Court | GNIF Brain Blogger | JC, MD writes that the costs of litigation are such that it often makes sense for health professionals to settle out of court rather than risk a fight. |
| Festival of Frugality | Slashing Our Budget by 25%: Our Latest Frugal Moves | Digerati Life | The Silicon Valley Blogger describes how she and her spouse are preparing to go through two or more years of lean times while one launches a startup company while the other leaves the corporate world. |
| Festival of Stocks | Simple Strategies to Inflation Proof a Portfolio! | FIRE Finance | FIRE Finance describes how Vanguard's Inflation-Protected Securities mutual fund (VIPSX) might be able to deliver outsize returns in a high-inflation economic environment. Absolutely essential reading! |
| Odysseus Medal (Real Estate) | The Art of Rhetoric - and the Rhetoric of Art | BloodhoundBlog | This week's Odysseus Medal winner is difficult for us to write up since it's actually eight posts (from a series of 13 posts) by Mike Farmer of Bonzai Real Estate Blog describing how Web 2.0 connectivity is affecting the world of real estate professionals. Just go and click each and every link! |
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
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