carnival

Watching too many Reality TV shows has been taking its toll on me, so I have come up with this absurd idea of an Internet Reality Show (aka American/ Indian Idol, Nach Baliye etc) for the Science bloggers (Psychology & Neurosciences to be precise, so that I have a fair chance of winning:-).

The Idea is like this:

1. Put up a pageflakes or some other type of page where RSS feeds (title only of 5 posts or so) of all participating bloggers are available.

2. Put another weekly challenge page that has RSS links of Full length articles by the participants on a particular weekly theme. These would be tagged with the theme keyword (say Evolution for 1st week) , so one can automatically have all the articles syndicated to that page. All authors would be expected to contribute one and only one article with that label in that week and this would be considered their weekly entry. One can even become traditional here, with time restrictions, and give a just released Seed/ NYT article as input for the theme article and just give a day (24 hrs) to blog about that. (Maybe seed or NYT can sponsor this:-)

Thus, we have a continuous RSS feed of all entries that simulates the practice or daily life behavior (blog posts) of the bloggers and we have a particular challenge entry on a given topic for a given week and this simulates their weekly ‘performances’.

3. We have a polling system : Like thimble that allows all readers to vote juts once each week for the participant they think wrote the best ‘performance article’ . This poll page would be present on the ‘performance page’ only, so thta as far as possible people vote based on performances.

4. We will allow comments on the performance entries by everyone; but the we’ll also have 2-3 highlighted comments by the Judges: Some judges chosen from blogosphere (Say Vaughan of Mind Hacks or P Z Myers of Pharyngula) and providing helpful comments about blogging style as well as content; while others may be practicing and famous scientists that do not find the time to blog usually but would anyway like to motivate us bloggers and would focus mostly on content; others may even be form professional journalistic field and enlighten us more about journalistic and media implications.

5. We might have eliminations at each stage (every week), so that only a few people remain in the end. (say only 2 in the final round, starting with 20 in the first round)

To ensure that people vote after reading the performance articles (and not based on the fact that they already are a reader of a particular blog) we can restrict the polling to happen only after a user (IP address) has browsed through all performance entries, but this seems unduly restrictive to me. I’ll let it on the readers to vote conscientiously and read the good blog entries that would be surely be generated as performance entries.

I know that we have Carnivals that already satisfy the need to collect the best of the blogosphere; but this may add some glamour to the blogging community and get more readers involved.

I would love if someone suffering from Blogorrehea (aka Coturnix at The Clock) could come forward and take the responsibility of organizing this. I would definitely help, and if no one sponsosrs, will sponsor this—-if an award would seem like a good incentive—Anyway we will have the Blogosphere Idol or some such title that should keep us bloggers motivated enough (and of course the increased readership would be the best reward).

So drop me a mail/ comment below if you are interested in elaborating on this theme/ participating etc.

Email me at sandygautam17ATgmailDOTcom

Lets get the first Internet Reality Show going!!