How to Host a Carnival of the Mobilists

Here are a few notes to guide potential and actual hosts of the Carnival.

1. We always need volunteers to host, so don’t be shy about stepping up. Hosts get great exposure and extra traffic that week – and many new readers will stick around if they like what they find. To qualify, you will need to have submitted 3 posts to the Carnival. When you are on board with that qualification, to volunteer as a host email Peggy Anne Salz at peggy AT msearchgroove DOT com.

2. We want the Carnival to adopt the character of the host site every week, so we try to avoid being too prescriptive. All we ask is that you feature at least 10 submissions from entries we receive.

3. Checklist for your Carnival:

We have returned to our original way of managing entries: Hosts simply obtain the entries from the gmail account and then write their Carnival as a post on their own blog. We are no longer using the BlogCarnival service.

• To access the week’s contributions, you begin by visiting the Carnival’s gmail account (www.gmail.com) and sign in to our account. You will be sent the user name and password on the Wednesday during your hosting week. If it doesn’t arrive or you would like it sooner, ask Peggy by emailing peggy AT msearchgroove DOT com.

• Entries should arrive by midnight GMT on Friday, but we do get late ones too. It would be good if you accommodate them.

• If you get more entries than 10 (which is pretty likely), it’s up to you how you deal with these. It’s nice if you link to them, even better if you link and describe them. But we appreciate that your time is limited and you may be restricted as to how much more work you can do.

• Add a label (yours will be the next number “00″) to the emails in gmail that are the posts we use – helps keep things organized.

• To help the next week’s host, when you finish picking your entries send a marker email to the gmail account with a subject line: NEXT CARNIVAL POSTS ARE ABOVE THIS LINE. The date of your email will position it as a marker.

• One post in your Carnival should be your “Best Post of the Week”.

• If possible, try to choose and highlight a newcomer to the Carnival.

• You can also choose an entry from Smart Mobs (www.smartmobs.com) from the previous week. This means that we can also promote your hosting there too.

• Your job as host is to “sell” the reader on visiting individual contributors’ sites, NOT to summarise the entries so that a visit isn’t needed. Therefore, don’t tell the whole story – get the reader to want to read the whole post.

• Please finish your post by telling readers where the next Carnival will be held. See the “Schedule” tab above for this information.

• You should aim to get the Carnival up and running on your site by Monday of the next week.

Traffic

Once the Carnival is up on your site, everyone who has been featured should link to you and send you lots of their traffic. If you notice that someone isn’t playing the game, it’s ok to gently remind them to announce it, but generally people are very good about doing this. However, there’s another thing you can do to get more quality traffic and promote your hosting. We recommend you do this, but it’s your decision.

Forum Oxford: Forum Oxford is a free forum for the mobile industry run by Oxford University. It hosts quality debate among key luminaries and is worth joining anyway if you’re not already a member. You can repost your Carnival post there (as a new topic) but without individual links to the posts BUT do link to your site. The idea is to give people a flavour of what the Carnival is about that week, but they have to come to your site to get the links to the stories. Once you’ve signed up you can announce the Carnival is at your site. Something along the lines of:

“Carnival # XY is Out.

Check out the latest Carnival of the Mobilists, which is at [name of my site] this week. Please pay a visit to read this week’s best writing about mobile on the web. Watch out for [write a sentence about a story that will pull people in].”

Finally, don’t forget to email Peggy at peggy AT msearchgroove DOT com that the Carnival is up. Peggy will notify the other Mobilists to link to you.

If you’ve just hosted a Carnival and can think of anything that you’d like to see here that would help future hosts, please let us know.

Good luck. May your traffic counters begin to spin!