Post the Entire Carnival All at Once
Brian Gongol


The March 28, 2005 Carnival of the Capitalists broke with tradition and posted only half of the entries by the usual Monday-morning publication time, with the promise that the rest would follow a few days later.

Here are some arguments in favor of putting the entire Carnival up at once, rather than in segments:
  1. The Carnival is intended as a summary of the best posts in a given week. Fragmented or serialized summaries won't achieve the same effect, just like TV Guide or Reader's Digest wouldn't be the same if they were delivered three times a week.

  2. Carnival entries are usually intended to be topical; thus, the longer the time between the date of submission and the date of publication, the less relevant the post will be

  3. Fragmenting or serializing the Carnival could be seen as a naked ploy for higher traffic to the host's site, a stunt intended to drag out the expected spike in traffic over two events rather than just one

  4. Splitting up the Carnival into multiple episodes diminishes the "big tent" atmosphere that makes the Carnival attractive as a way to exhibit the many different ideas that qualify as "capitalist" thinking. See also some related thoughts on excluding contributors over political differences.

  5. Serializing the Carnival risks creating link exhaustion: It may be possible to get a link from high-traffic sites (like Instapundit) to the Carnival once a week, but it may be too much to ask them to give the Carnival multiple links every week

  6. If readers are exhausted by lengthy Carnival listings, that should create an incentive for the hosts to innovate new and better ways of summarizing and categorizing that information
Overall, the arguments for a single weekly Carnival of the Capitalists are much more compelling than those for a fragmented or episodic post.