7 Responses to “Reviving the Carnival of Mathematics”

1. Anonymous March 21st, 2012

   I’m glad to see the CoM has found a new home! Are you still going to aim at publishing on the first Friday of the month?

   I run the Math Teachers at Play carnival, and I’ve been thinking of switching our publication date to Mondays. I don’t want to end up conflicting with your carnival, however — it’s better to keep them spread out over the course of a month, so there are always new posts to browse.

   Reply
2. Peter Rowlett March 21st, 2012

   Hi Anonymous!

   Thanks for getting in touch. This time the Carnival should really be thought of as a transitional oddity but I suggested the first week of the month specifically to avoid MTAP. (I have only since realised that Friday was the day deliberately.) So I agree about spreading out the Carnivals but do you think there is a good reason to choose a particular day of the week? I think I am of the view that a couple of days either way isn’t significant so long as we stay a couple of weeks apart so as not to clash.

   It would be good to know who you are and put you in touch with Katie and Christian too. You can email me via my website.

   Also do you know anything about blogcarnival.com? We haven’t been able to get it to load for days.

   Reply
3. Denise March 22nd, 2012

   Sorry, I didn’t mean to be anonymous, but a glitch in the comment form never gave me a place to enter my information.

   The blog carnival site has been wonky for months and died entirely a few weeks ago. They may get it back up someday, but I don’t want to rely on them. I followed your lead and set up a Google Docs submission form for MTaP, too.

   I’ve been talking with Guillermo Bautista about carnival scheduling, since without the blog carnival site to check, I would like to have some kind of general guideline.

   Rather than set a specific day, I would like to just set the week (ie, the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd *full* week of a month, ignoring the little short chunks at the beginning and end of each month). Then I can let the host pick which day within that week is best for him or her. Sue at Math Mama Writes… mentioned that the best day for her varies, depending on whether school is in session or not. And some bloggers who follow their stats more closely than I do probably have opinions about which days of the week a post is more likely to attract viewers.

   In the past, the Carnival of Mathematics has gone the first week of each month, a tradition leftover from way back in the beginning. If you want to stick with that, then Guillermo and I will split up the 2nd and 3rd weeks. It doesn’t matter much to me either way, as long as we keep the carnivals nicely spaced out.

   Reply
4. Denise March 22nd, 2012

   BTW: Your link to Mike’s post is broken. It just links right back to here.

   Reply
5. Peter Rowlett March 22nd, 2012

   @Denise:

   A glitch? In Blogger? Surely not! ;)

   I wonder if we might attract fewer junk submissions being off blog carnival anyway.

   I’m happy with the suggestion that the precise day of the week is up to the host. Also happy to say CoM is 1st week of the month and you and Guillermo agree between yourselves to take the 2nd and 3rd.

   Katie is planning a page to index the CoM posts and link to the submission form, etc. probably under our new collaboration aperiodical.com. Do you have something like this? Might it be worth coordinating something for all three, or are we better separate?

   Thanks for pointing out the incorrect link, and being charitable enough to call it “broken”. More haste, less speed!

   Reply
6. Denise March 22nd, 2012

   Actually, blogcarnival.com wasn’t passing through very many spam submissions (at least, to us) the past few months. It was really refreshing to have the good posts far outnumber the spam! I’m hoping, too, that our separate forms will be more difficult for spammers to find.

   Since the little chunks of a week we often get at the beginning of a month always throw me off (“It’s March already?!”), I’m going to count “full” weeks as Monday-Friday. MTaP will plan on posting sometime during the second full week of each month, at the host’s discretion. CoM can have anytime before that, and Maths & Multimedia has the latter part of the month to play with.

   We may have a bit of transition time in this schedule, if the second full week doesn’t contain the 3rd Friday, depending on how fixed or flexible my April and May hosts’ schedules are. But from June onward, that will be my plan.

   I’m hoping to set up an MTaP page at my blog, but for now the MTaP tag will bring up all the old carnivals in reverse order of publication. If you want to create an index page, that would be fine. I can see it being convenient to have all three carnivals listed, but I wouldn’t want to be the one who has to keep it current. I know myself, and I don’t do well with long-term projects like that.

   Reply
7. Gianluigi Filippelli March 30th, 2012

   First of all: welcome back!
   Second: I think that Google docs is a good solution for submission. For example for Carnival of Space we use a Gdocs spreadsheet, shared between the Carnival bloggers, in order to submit the posts.

   Reply