2005 Koufax Awards

The Koufax Awards, hosted by the Wampum blog, recognize good work by liberal bloggers in many categories. After a long round of nominations, the nominees have been tallied and the first round of voting is now open. Directions for voting with links to the various categories can be found here. This round of voting will narrow the list to 6-10 finalists per category, and then there will be another round to determine the winners.

Even if you do not plan on voting, it is worth taking a look through the lists of nominees. There are many excellent blogs represented there. Unfortunately there are far too many to get a good sense of all of them.

Melting in Antarctica

The ice sheet covering Antarctica is melting faster than expected.

The new Antarctic measurements, using data from two NASA satellites called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), found that the amount of water pouring annually from the ice sheet into the ocean -- equivalent to the amount of water the United States uses in three months -- is causing global sea level to rise by 0.4 millimeters a year. The continent holds 90 percent of the world's ice, and the disappearance of even its smaller West Antarctic ice sheet could raise worldwide sea levels by an estimated 20 feet.

House Finches

Yesterday afternoon I heard a house finch singing on my street for the first time since last spring. It was right on cue for early March; the first singing house finches near my apartment were on March 3 in 2004 and March 13 in 2005. (At least those are the dates in my records.)

Tags:

• Birds
• House Finch

I and the Bird #18

Two weeks ago Rob Fergus, wearing his Audubon at Home hat, spent a weekend coordinating the Great Backyard Bird Count. This week, wearing his Birdchaser hat, he can be found hosting the eighteenth I and the Bird., set up as a look back thirty years into the future.

The next installment will be at Science and Politics.

Tags:

• Blog carnivals

Hosting Carnival of the Vanities

Last Wednesday I hosted the 179th Carnival of the Vanities. Though I had submitted posts to this carnival before, I was not sure quite what to expect in terms of submissions or in terms of traffic.

The submissions were eclectic, as is standard for a generalist carnival like the Carnival of the Vanities. However, there tends to be stronger participation in this carnival from political and financial blogs than from blogs on other subjects. I tried to emphasize more of the latter, with limited success.

Here is a graph of the traffic over the past month.

As you can see, hosting the carnival produced a modest spike. On February 22, the carnival attracted 190 hits. This was roughly triple the average daily traffic that this blog had received to that point.

Here are a few thoughts on hosting and publicizing carnivals:

• Hosting a niche carnival like I and the Bird is easier than hosting a generalist carnival like Carnival of the Vanities. When most posts share a general subject matter, it is easier to group similar posts and emphasize the best ones.
• By the same token, hosting Carnival of the Vanities requires being ready to read posts (especially political posts) with which one disagrees. This does not necessarily mean setting aside your editorial voice, but it does require being civil to people with opposing viewpoints for a day.
  
• If you do host Carnival of the Vanities, expect links to pour in from the start since there is only a one-week turnaround between editions. It is vital to start reading and summarizing as soon as possible; otherwise you will be left with an overload of posts to read on Tuesday evening. My edition included close to 50 entries, which is a good deal more reading than when I hosted I and the Bird #5 in September.
  
• Getting a listing in the TTLB Übercarnival is almost more trouble than it is worth. NZ Bear requires that an exact phrase be included in the post - but does not include that phrase in the submission form. A simple link back ought to be enough, especially since we are providing free content for his site. Even after the link was up, I received very few referrals from that page.
• More generally, publicizing carnivals requires a good deal of footwork, and probably more than I accomplished in my turn at COTV. Links from highly-trafficked blogs are the key, but these require knowing which are the best to contact ahead of time.
• A long term increase in traffic is more likely to come from a niche carnival than from a generalist one. Even the niche carnivals, though, may not create a dramatic increase right away. What they will do is raise a blog's profile among people with similar interests and increase the number of incoming links.
  

This week's Carnival of the Vanities is now online at the Cigar Intelligence Agency.

Tags:

• Blogging
• Blog Carnivals