Philosophers' Carnival Update

Andrew Nichols of Philosophical Poetry has kindly volunteered to host the third Philosophers' Carnival, which is set to take place next Monday, 4th October.

The Philosophers' Carnival project is at a critical stage right now. Having just taken its first tentative steps, it still isn't quite sure of its footing. More specifically, the project depends upon three areas of blogospheric support: publicity, participation, and hosting.

1) Publicity:
This is particularly important during the project's infancy. Some philosophy bloggers may still be unaware of the carnival's existence, whilst others will have forgotten about it. Fortunately, this problem is extremely easy to solve. All you have to do is:
(i) Link to the carnival homepage, reminding your readers of each upcoming carnival; and
(ii) Link to each carnival after it is published.

Update: You can now receive automatic notification of these events, by subscribing to the newsletter.

2) Participation:
This is absolutely crucial. The Philosophers' Carnival is a community project, and simply cannot survive without widespread participation from the rest of the blogging community.

To help get the project underway, I actually added some extra 'nominations' to both previous carnivals, so that some posts from major philosophy blogs were included even if their authors never explicited submitted them. I would like to wean the carnival off this practice, if possible.

Philosophy bloggers: I am relying on you to submit your own posts to each carnival. The form only takes a few seconds to fill out, so it's not a big ask.

3) Hosting:
We need some more volunteers to host future carnivals. Basically what this involves is compiling all the submitted links together into one post, and quoting a brief excerpt from each. (Brandon's hosting of the second carnival was nothing short of a work of art. This is not required, however; cf. my more "no frills" approach to the first carnival.) Email me [r.chappell AT gmail.com] for further details.

(I'm actually surprised that more people haven't volunteered for this - smaller blogs especially. You'll receive a lot of inbound links and extra visitors. It's an excellent way to promote your blog and expand your readership!)

Group Blogs: With regard to the second point ('participation'), I think the core of the carnival could best be provided by the various university and topical group blogs (in addition to prominent individual blogs like TAR). These sites regularly produce some of the best philosophy the blogosphere has to offer - and this is precisely what the carnival aims to capture. Such a solid core would then support the forays of lesser-known bloggers - the other aim of the project.

I'd also like to point out that the restriction is one submission per author. That is, group blogs may make multiple submissions. It is up to each individual contributor to choose and submit their own post; but they need not worry about 'poaching' their co-blogger's place.

Conclusion:
What this really all comes down to is that you (I'm talking to all my fellow philosophy bloggers here) should:
1) Submit a post to the carnival
2) Tell everyone else to do likewise.

It'll only take a minute of your time. I hope you'll agree that this project is well worth it.