The Skeptics' Circle

If you don't know much about blogs and blogging, you probably won't know what a blog carnival is. Ben Vershbow gives as good as any definition of blog carnivals as I've ever seen.

A blog carnival is like a roving journal, a rotating showcase of interesting writing from around the blogosphere within a particular discipline. Individual bloggers volunteer to host a carnival on their personal blog, acting as chief editor for that edition. It falls to them to collect noteworthy items, and to sort through suggestions from the community, many of which are direct submissions from authors. On the appointed date (carnivals generally keep to a regular schedule) the carnival gets published and the community is treated to a richly annotated feast of new writing in the field.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, skeptic bloggers have their own blog carnival - The Skeptics' Circle - which has been running since February 2005, where it was started by a blogger who called himself St. Nate. St. Nate has unfortunately closed down his blog, but he was one of the early skeptic voices in the blogosphere. Here is his description of how the Skeptics' Circle came to be:

It all started a couple of weeks ago, when I surfed through three consecutive blogs that repeated the story about Bill Gates's Teen Beat photo spread. Then I became curious - I started to wonder if there were other people out there interested in counterbalancing the urban legends with critical thought. Like a true skeptic, I was driven by curiosity instead of doubt and I would only accept answers from evidence.

Tonight, I'm glad to say there are definitely a lot of bloggers interested in using their online forums to examine fads, solve mysteries, and correct misinformation. My vision has become a reality in a rather short space of time. So, with no further ado, it is my pleasure to host the First Skeptics' Circle.

Now, nearly six years after the initial blog carnival, the Skeptics' Circle is still going strong. St. Nate has retired from blogging, but before he did that, he passed on the responsibility of the Skeptics' Circle to Orac, who runs the blog Respectful Insolence.

While the blog carnival is by nature roaming from blog to blog, there is a central blog used for keeping track of it. It's somewhat ironically called Circular Reasoning. On that blog you can find the links to the currently 123 blog carnivals which has gone before, and can see when and where future carnivals will happen.

Disclosure: I have in the past hosted the Skeptics' Circle at two occasions