- The Carnival of the Liberals is intended to showcase the best of blogging from a liberal perspective. As such, submissions advocating conservatism, Libertarianism or any other 'ism' will not be considered. Of course, commentary on other 'isms' is certainly appreciated. If you have trouble deciding if your potential submission is of a sufficiently liberal perspective, please see the linked Wikipedia page on liberalism. Similarly, submissions should come from liberal bloggers. It's generally recognized that liberalism and liberal are broad categories and every allowance will be made to apply a "big tent" interpretation as to exactly what constitutes a liberal blogger. However, that interpretation is left to the discretion of the CotL organizers.
- Submissions should come from bona fide bloggers. That means a weblog that is regularly updated in a format in which the articles have dates on them, preferably with more recent articles at the top. We realize that the boundaries between a website and a blog can sometimes be blurry, but we think most people recognize a blog when they see one.
- The blogs from which submissions come don't necessarily have to be devoted to liberalism or liberal politics, but should have some content of that nature.
- Submissions should showcase the writing of the blogger submitting it. After all, the very purpose of this blog carnival is to showcase high quality liberal blogging. That's why Instapundit-style simple links with little or no commentary or analysis are rarely, if ever appropriate. However, commentary that quotes significantly from another link is certainly acceptable, as long as a signficant proportion of the content comes from the blogger.
- Submissions should be fairly recently written. Ideally, they should have been written after the last Carnival of the Liberals, but within the last month is usually acceptable. If the article is particularly good, the host may of course show some discretion.
- The very nature of the subject of CotL means that most submissions will be highly politically charged. While that's certainly fine, emotional rants are generally discouraged (unless they are particularly well written). The organizers of CotL would however like to specifically encourage submissions that emphasize the positve qualities of the liberal vision. As liberal philosophy and policy has been marginalized in recent decades we feel it is important that we take a break every now and then from our role of opposing regressive politics to actually reflect and espouse on why we are liberals and the brighter future that liberalism promises for everyone.
- Submissions should be received no later than 11:59PM EST the Monday prior to the next edition of the Carnival of the Liberals to be considered for inclusion in that CotL. At least that's how it works in theory. Individual hosts may have their own time frames to work with. It's best to check with the official call for submissions post by the host of the next edition or here at the CotL home site.
- As always, submissions should be made using our web form. If you're having problems with the web form, then please send your submissions to cotl-submissions@carnivaloftheliberals.com. Please note that RBLs and very tight spam filtering are used at that address so if you do not hear back from us that your submission was received within a day or two please consider resending it from another e-mail address.
Certain large sections of the above guidelines have been liberally 'borrowed' from Orac's guidelines for the Skeptic's Circle.
