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This is embarrassing. I remembered everyday when Tyme’s birthday was and the day it occurs it doesn’t hit me until 9:45 at night. I am such a horrible CEO and friend, but you already knew that. In any case, we are blessed to have a senior citizen on our team. She is easily the coolest, ornery black woman I have ever dealt with and I would trade her in for the world.

She has made my job so much easier and for that I can only say thank you and we wish you 60 more wonderful years on this planet.

When we announced the Round 4 list I knew there was going to be some excitement and disdain for the simple fact that it is a lot of sites. 115 (yes we added 4 more and could quite possibly sneak a couple more in) members added in one fell swoop is no laughing matter and almost double our current member base so it’s only right for some people to be concerned about us losing our exclusivity.

It would be nice to admit that there is a plan on how much more we would like to grow, but to be honest we are starting to reach new territories now. We are starting to see submissions every round where the quality gets better and better and that was the “problem” with Round 4. There were just too many damn good sites to say no to. When asked what number we are going to take every round, we always respond by saying we never want to put a cap on quality.

I can understand when you see such a large number you may think that we are growing too fast, but if you sit back and think about it, we have only had 4 rounds in over a year. We only add sites when we are ready to grow and in between each round we have updated our site to try and improve the experience for our Members and Readers. Changes will be made further to this site in the upcoming weeks (as has been mentioned before) that will make communities more like communities.

We have to solve the problem of keeping relevant content within each community. Our biggest issue is definitely that design content can show up in the science community as an example. Once that is solved, our community pages become even more relevant. There are of course other issues that need addressing as well and we are looking into those.

It’s no secret that we want all of our communities to become the go to places on the web for that topic. Our next site update will extend that vision further by truly making 9rules a community for both Members and Readers to participate in. This also includes adding the best sites in each community regardless of community size.

We accepted 115 sites out of 700. That’s only 16.4% of the overall total so depending on your definition of exclusivity maybe we should’ve let in less. Technorati tracks over 43 million sites and if we pretend that only half of those are blogs that means 9rules contains around 0.00012% of the blogosphere so I don’t think we will be hitting the mainstream any time soon.

I was going to post some screenies of the new stuff, but I need to talk to the team first to see if they are ready to show themselves naked (it’s 3am and they are all sleep).

Some time this week we will send out emails to all the sites accepted into Round 4 with the new member agreement and some instructions on what you need to do before you become official 9rules members. I was just trying to enjoy the rest of my short weekend before I began the assimilation…errr, integration of these great new sites. So just a little bit more patience and the process will begin.

Also, it seems some people are taking the list personally if they don’t see themselves on it. Understand that when you are going over so many sites in a short period of time it is definitely possible to miss a couple of high-quality ones in the mix. Hopefully, there is a time down the road where we can find them again and pick them up. Blogging is about having fun and whether you got in or not shouldn’t be your concern, but whether you are having fun doing what you do.

Some people have emailed me to tell me how fortunate we are to have so many sites submit during round 4 and admittedly it was a blessing and a curse at the same time. Going through 10 sites is not an easy task and multiply that by 70 and you have about 2 weeks of stress wrapped in a nice little package. Out of 700 sites, 111 were selected and many of the ones that weren’t selected were close, but either needed a little more time or a little more focus. I wish it was possible to send every site an email explaining what can be improved and maybe one day we will have a system in place, but for now we can only email the sites on this list.

Keep in mind, these sites were the ones selected, but are not in the Network yet until they have agreed to the member agreement so take this as a preliminary list. Congratulations to everyone. Comments are closed for obvious reasons.

Hope the formatting on this list isn’t too fudged up.

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Some of us on the 9rules team (Paul, Mike, and I) are childless. Tyme is blessed with two lovely kids named Lenora and Damon. Well, Paul has a few out there somewhere too, but – nevermind.

Steve Smith of OrderedList, and his wife have recently welcomed a new edition into their family. Jackson Steven Smith was born on May 28th 2006.

We here at 9rules, and the entire Network of members, would like to congratulate the Smith family and can’t wait until baby Jackson makes it home. Don’t waste too much time staring at this kid, though I know it is addicting.