Welcome back!

The Carnival of Socialism is getting back on track due to popular demand and a regrettable failure of capitalism to overthrow itself. John has been joined as editor by Jim and Dave to make a small but perfectly formed team which will be taking the Carnival forward into 2008.

You'll see in the right hand column a number of dates scheduled for carnivals to take place, as follows;

• Feb 1st The Daily (Maybe)
• Feb 15th Stroppyblog
  
• Feb 29th Jack Ray
  
• March 13th Power to the people
  
• March 27th
• April 10th

We want lefty bloggers to take the bit between their teeth and sign up for one of these dates as soon as possible so we can get a momentum going. To sign yourself up simply leave your blog address and the date you'd like to take on in the comments box below and we'll get back to you asap.

Last year we had some themed carnivals and we may well go back to that at some point but for now we're just looking for fortnightly round ups of the weird and wonderful blog entries from the socialist blogosphere. We're sure that bloggers will want to highlight their regular reads but we also hope that the carnival will encourage people to expand their reading range and dip into issues they don't often think about. We'd like to see carnivals that push the boundaries, that go beyond the same old faces as well as revisit these old familiar friends.

Something else we'll be considering later on in the year is a redesign for the site - expanding its blog links as well as linking to left field publications on the net, hopefully making the site a useful first port of call when seeking out the net left. All suggestions for the site - be they blogs, publications, rss feeds or whatever will be gladly received - this relaunch is a great opportunity to ensure we've linked to your blog and those reads you find unmissable.

The beauty of the blogosphere, and carnivals in particular, is that they provide an opportunity to celebrate the diversity in our movement as well as those things that unite us. We hope that we'll help provoke debate, discussion, sometimes even argument - but ultimately we want to help bring the left together in order to be better able to promote a socialist agenda in the twenty first century.