Something I’ve enjoyed a fair bit over the last couple of years is the idea of a blog carnival. You can learn what they are mostly by looking at them, but essentially the idea is that about every month a blog is chosen to host a given carnival, in which they link to a number of thematically related posts with short summaries or reactions. The one I’ve most often dropped in on is The Carnival of Feminists (Down Under Feminists Carnival has also just started up), The Festival of Frugality I’ve also seen once or twice (budgeting and frugality blogs are mostly run by people who both live in the US and have extracted themselves out from under tens of thousands of dollars of consumer debt though, so a lot of it is ‘spend less than you earn!’ advice that I’ve never had much need for).
There’s also Club Troppo’s Missing Link Daily which does actually pass through my feed reader, and from which I occasionally launch a spate of new tabs (the secret to carnivals in general is not being completionist about them, for goodness sake, people are already getting down when their reader says they aren’t up to date).
It’s not something I’ve come across in the Free Software blogs though, or at least not enough to have ever made it to a Planet. The blogcarnival site shows a couple of software development related carnivals, mostly defunct. As far as Free Software goes, the Planets are probably part of the reason, they already bring together a bunch of thematically related posts, or rather, people likely to make thematically related posts some of the time, but I still think there’d be room for a carnival of some type, for a couple of reasons: one is getting some cross-community linking, and the other is selecting individual posts of high quality.
If you’d be interesting in doing one round of hosting for such a thing, get in touch, if I get enough interest (and if I get a few non-Australians), the experiment would be worth a go.