Community and Carnivals

Andrew Hughes says in AnyLetter: I'm a Moron,

As I've said before, the Carnival of Computing doesn't travel because I have to gather all the links by hand, and until that gets more automated, I can't with good conscience make someone else do that. Takes at least four hours, and I doubt that many people have that kind of time (hell, I sure don't).

I can't speak to whether he's a moron or not (I think his blog is great, but it could be that's because I'm a moron). I do think he's going about the process of building what should be a slam dunk carnival, backwards.

It's because you can't spread the hosting work around that you're stuck spending four hours collecting links. Why not instead work just a bit toward building the community of computing bloggers, and let the carnival come out of that, rather than the other way around. Anyway, that's the approach that Blog Carnival is generally taking, and it seems to be working.

Building carnivals is all about getting a critical mass of participants, not a critical mass of links. It's not that hard.