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:
- 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.
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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
- 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