Website: www.epiccarnival.com

Interview With: Doug Sheckler

When did you start Epic Carnival?

It all began on July 15, 2007.

What made you start it?

I saw so much talent out there in the sports blogosphere and thought it would be cool to bring a bunch of them together under one umbrella to make a “super” blog of sorts.

What is your background?

Marketing and public relations.

Do you blog for fun or are you trying to make it a career?

I blog for fun, but if it turned into a career I wouldn’t complain.

What is your goal with this blog?

To be a daily destination of choice for sports fans everywhere.

What was your tipping point? What put you on the map?

We’re on the map? Cool. All the credit has to go to the great writers and their willingness to promote this venture on their own sites with a little help from our friends in Blogfrica like SI: Extra Mustard, SPORTSbyBROOKS, AOL FanHouse, and Mondesi’s House.

What type of blogging software do you use?

For Epic Carnival right now its Blogger. For now.

What ad network(s) do you use?

If I told you I’d have to kill you. Kidding. The main network right now is Yarbarker, but we also are with a few more.

How much money do you make off your site monthly?

Classified. But it’s enough to feed the Swiss Army.

If you could get something for free to help you out with your blog, what would it be? (Ex: design, marketing, ad optimization, etc).

A person who really knows their shit when it comes to CSS and PHP to help really make the site jump.

What are some of your favorite blogs and what are some of your least favorite blogs?

Faves other than those who write for EC because I obviously like them a lot: SPORTSbyBROOKS, SI: Extra Mustard, Awful Announcing, EDSBS, flatusyahu, Hollywood Tuna, Jack’s Sports Humor, Brahsome, Tasty Booze, Tirico Suave, TunaFlix, We are the Postmen, and on205th.com. Non-Faves: I don’t want to burn any bridges here…

Any bold predictions for the future of sports on the internet?

There will be sports on the Internet in the future!

STN’s Take:

Doug has a very good thing going over Epic Carnival. He has done a great job of bringing a bunch of sports comedy writers to one place. If you are looking for some skin and a laugh, head over to Epic Carnival. And if you aren’t looking for some skin and a laugh, you mine as well just go to sleep.

We would like to see Doug move from Blogger to Wordpress because there are just way too many benefits there to be missing out on. Though as he says we are using Blogger for now, he is probably looking to chnage. One thing we really noticed about his blog that we like is when you click “Read More”, it just expands the post instead of going to a new page. That is a great option but it will hurt him in the page view area when it comes to ads. One thing we don’t like about the site is all the link tags at the top. Put those on the sidebar. Tagging is very important for search engines and you want to tag as much about your story as possible. As his site gathers more tags, it will look even worse.