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As we mentioned earlier, a new 9rules is coming this month. Let’s talk about how to get into 9rules and future 9rules rounds.

Round Dates

We will be holding rounds three times this year. In the past we were spontaneous with announcing when the rounds will be. This led to people missing the rounds, creating a backlog of email for me wondering when the next round would be, etc. For 2008, we will be holding rounds on the following dates:

• May 7, 2008
• August 6, 2008
• November 5, 2008

The round will open at midnight EST on those dates and close 24 hours later. Mark your calendar, put sticky notes on the refrigerator…if you are interested in joining 9rules those are the three dates for 2008 you can submit your site. When you submit your site you will taken to a page notifying you that your submission was received.

Going Through the Submissions

Depending on the volume of submissions it will take between 30-60 days to go through them all. Once complete, I will publish a list of sites that are accepted on the blog and the site owners will receive an email from me. When I publish the list of sites that were accepted, I will publish some of the main reasons why a site was not accepted. For most, the site owner will be able to notice similarities in their blog and the points listed in the entry.

SuperStream It!

How does 9rules go through the sites and decide which sites are accepted? Usually I go through the bulk of the sites but the guys take time out programming/designing to go through the sites as well. For one hour on a date to be announced we will be holding a SuperStream and you’ll see what we do when we go through sites. In case you missed past SuperStreams, this is when the three of us hop on our webcams and interact with viewers via chat. You’ll be able to see our expressions and hear how we make decisions on accepting sites.

• We will not be disclosing the URLs or site names so your privacy is still guaranteed.
• We will not be drinking to ensure we don’t disclose URLs or site names.
• I will be randomly pick sites to go through on the SuperStream. We will all be looking at the sites for the first time.

That’s It…For Now

I tried to think of a way to smoothly (and efficiently) go through the sites, notify everyone of their status and have fun too. If you have any questions, let me know.