The Giving Carnival: Next Steps

Thanks to everyone who submitted suggestions for evolving The Giving Carnival into something even better. It seems we have three challenges:

How do we track the conversation across multiple blogs? Isn’t there a widget out there that lets you subscribe by email to a particular post, so that you get an email every time a new comment is submitted? I’ve tried searching for one, but can’t find it. Any nptech’ers out there that can help us out?

How do we interconnect the various posts in the Carnival, rather than letting them stand on their own? Albert Ruesga has a couple suggestions that people seemed to like. I’ll try out a couple and see what sticks.

How do we expand the Carnival to include voices from the offline world? Phil Cubeta submitted an excellent suggestion. The kind of suggestion that made me sit back in awe and realize why Phil is so good at building networks:

How about inviting someone who does not blog to "meet the press" by having an interview or an essay published. Then, on a given day, others would be invited to comment and the noted author, would participate in the comment section for that one day. Even a busy person might agree to those terms.

The purpose would be to widen the conversation by including those "movers and shakers" who do not blog, for example, Walter Issacson or Adam Myerson from Aspen, or Bill Schambra from Hudson. Would they be willing to "meet the press" online?

Or, think of it as a call-in show, where the voices from the hinterlands are blog comments.

So let’s do this. I’ll be playing with the format of the Carnival over the next couple weeks. Let me know what you like and what you don’t like, and be sure to participate. I’ll work on getting some of the offline luminaries that Phil suggests to stop by and play. It will be interesting to see where we take this thing.