[Cross-posted to the Ancient World Bloggers Group.]

If you’re not familiar with the term a Blog Carnival is a series of blog posts which are collections of links to other blog posts. An example would be the History Carnival or Four Stone Hearth. The carnival aspect comes from the fact that each post is compiled by a different editor and held at a different weblog. The original aim was to try and put posts from various bloggers which may have been missed in front of a wider audience. What I’ve been thinking about for several months is that it may be worthwhile re-thinking the concept of a blog carnival.

The thing that’s pushed me into posting is the exciting potential of Sebastian Heath and Billur Tekkök’s project Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia) which inspired Shawn Graham to compile some of his posts into a free e-book Electric Archaeology. The exciting thing about these books is that they provide material in a form that’s citable in front of a technophobic audience. You can simply cite Author, date, Title, and Lulu.com as the publisher. This may get sniffs from people who would call this vanity publishing, but would be happy supplying camera-ready copy and their own referees to a ‘respectable’ publisher. You can’t have everything and for everyone else it provides a canonical reference to cite. Importantly to the reader this e-book can be provided at zero-cost, and for the publisher it is lo-cost or no-cost. If this approach were applied to blog carnivals, it would be possible to create a periodical available as a CC licenced e-book and a hardcopy with ISSNs. This would provide canonical citations for blog posts which for various reasons haven’t been re-written for academic journals. Could this be used to create a bridge between weblogs and the unwebbed?
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