What Opinions are Like

Our good neighbor Will is hosting this week's Carnival of the Vanities. It's week 152 of the thing, so it's been around the block a few times. Nothing wrong with that. I feel compelled to eat up some bandwidth on the goings-on over there, though. Will has (maybe for the first time) installed a rating system to the entries. Zero means "One of the most awful posts I have ever read" and a 10 is "One of the best posts I have ever read." This has caused a minor (so far) stir in the comments with folks that got scores below five (which represented an average post.) I like it. The problem is that Will, by law of the Carnival, must link and post everything. Even the crap. It's supposed to be a carnival with the best blog posts self-submitted for the week and people are submitting some certified poo-poo for sake of traffic. Evidence A Did you read that? I'm sorry if you did. I didn't really know what was going on nor did I care but that gem was submitted and therefore it was published. The poster was Andrew Ian Dodge and he took offense to Will's rating of a '4.' It was a generous rating, in my opinion. It probably took quite some time to read all the entries and to stumble across entries like that would probably be a little frustrating. I know I would be. So Will decided to cut to the chase and separate the cream from the crap and it's created a great comment thread. I ran into the same issue when we hosted the Bonfire of the Vanities the last time. Only it was the opposite. The BotV is supposed to be the worst post of the week submitted for ridicule. And ridicule I did. But some folks submitted good posts... posts not crappy at all... at a carnival designed for total crap. So I essentially did what Will did and put the submissions in categories and processed me a bonfire. The moral of the story is: If you submit entries to blog carnivals, no whining. And don't submit for the sake of submitting unless you can take the deriding that it may lead to. And while I'm on the topic, The Carnival of Crazy IV is due up in one week. Email me your submissions now, whores!