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Another day and another few new 9rules members to welcome!

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Congratulations!!! You’ll be hearing from Tyme very shortly

A quick note regarding there only being 2 new members today. No, we didn’t slack off this morning and only go through a handful of sites, we actually went through more sites today than we normally do but the decisions were pretty difficult. Some things that we came across that hurt a site’s chances for acceptance:

• Writing a lot in October to get ready for Round 5 Submission, and then not writing again afterwards.
• Long gaps in posting. Some sites will write 3x a week for a month and then take a full month off before writing again. We don’t ask members to have a set schedule, but we do like to see consistency because it sets readers’ expectations.
• Blog posts that are dominated by YouTube videos that weren’t produced by the blog owner. Scattering videos throughout a longer article to break up the monotony or have some fun is a great idea, but when you have 3x as many videos in your post as sentences then things get a little fishy.
• Long quotes, little interpretation. Some blogs that we’ve gone over have 3-4 paragraphs of quoting in an entry and only a few sentences of original thought or interpretation. Quoting someone else and then voicing your opinion is great if you’re actually responding, but using the quote as your entry isn’t really the way to go and could get you into some copyright troubles.
• Splogs or “cash blogs” don’t make it into 9rules because it’s not what we’re really about. Some people submit their blog and you can tell the goal is just to make a cheap buck. I’m not talking about generating some revenue on a subject you’re passionate about, but more like blogs on mesothelioma or bankruptcy that have a gajillion AdSense blocks splattered about. We don’t let sites like these in no matter what.
• And I guess I should probably say this since it might not be clear to everyone, but we can’t let a site in that has only static content and no blog or news-like information. I can’t tell you how many brochure-type sites submit

Over at Bloggertalks.com I was interviewed and talked about lots of fun stuff.

Some things that came up in the interview:

• We don’t care about a blog’s traffic figures when considering them for admission, contrary to many other networks. It’s all about the content, baby.
• A 4-figure bribe from a wannabe member, sorry man!
• What’s going on with Featured and 9rules Live

Good stuff!

We’ve been hard at work on the next version of 9rules.com for a bit now, and will soon be getting various parts of it out to our members for beta testing. The current version’s codename is Phoenix, which represented our blossoming into something beautiful (take that how you want!) and the next version of our site is called Ali, as in Muhammad Ali. Paul and I have been busy rewriting a lot of the 9rules codebase to make things faster and easier to manage, and we wanted a name that represented tremendous strength and agility, thus Paul came up with Ali, one of the greatest boxers there ever was.

Now our upcoming Ali release represents a lot more than just sleeker code, it also heralds the release of 9rules Notes 2.0 (many new features, bug fixes), 9rules Communities 3.0 (making our great Community pages even easier to use), and a brand new section called 9rules Live which I’m keeping my trap shut about

The challenge with this website is the tremendous volume of content and types of content we need to display. We have over 200 members (soon to be more!) across 30+ verticals, all their entries, favicons, titles, screenshots, etc. For 9rules Notes we have over 700 entries, 6000 comments, and about 1500 registered users, all of which need proper visibility and highlighting. Since Communities and Notes work with and drive traffic to one another, their integration is key to make the user’s total experience as valuable and interesting as possible.

We’re not really into formal surveys (I always hated quantitative usability testing!) but we do have 2 questions we’d love everyone to take a second to answer: Keep in mind that more RSS feeds and profile editing are already in the works!

• 1. Do you use 9rules Notes? If not, tell us why… if yes, tell us what we could improve upon.
• 2. How can we improve browsability? More/less entries on the homepage? More excerpts on Community pages? Something else?

Any other feedback, please let us know!

To say that our Round 5 with 1,190 submissions was big is a real understatement. We got blog submissions from all over the world, on a variety of different platforms, on dozens of different subjects, all from people who are passionate about the blog they own, run, and love.

Here’s a graph depicting how Round 5 stacks up against our first four membership rounds:

Round 5 was by far our largest round, but it’s also many other things. Here are some statistics I thought were pretty interesting:

• If you break it down per minute, we received an average of more than 1 blog every minute for the first 19 hours.
• If you add up the total number of blogs from all networks it’s still less than the total number of blogs submitted to 9rules in just one day. But quantity doesn’t mean quality, I’ll get to that in a bit.
• We reached 500 submissions twice as fast as Round 4.
• We beat Round 4′s total number of submissions in just over 9 hours, or, before I woke up (Paul says he went to bed right before 9am)
• We had over 170 comments on our number guessing game.
• One person submitted their site three minutes after we shut down the form, we have no idea how that happened… I think he/she had the form loaded up in their browser ahead of time and then just left it there past when we removed it. Go figure!
• Our IRC room had dozens of people in it, with a max number of them in right around midnight. The chatters counted down to the end of the round like it was New Years… very cool to see. Happppy New Round!

Now just because we got over one thousand applications doesn’t mean that we’re accepting anywhere close to that, of course who knows, maybe every single one is amazing! Traditionally we’ve added between 8-16% of the total number of submissions to 9rules, so if that holds true then “you can assume” we’ll pick about 160 blogs this time, but obviously that’s totally up in the air right now so no promises can be made. One thing I can say is that with every round the blogs who submit get even better, making our jobs all that more difficult

As of yesterday the logo atop the website was removed. I don’t know if it’s down permanently or whether they’re removing it from their ad campaigns, but I’m really, really happy with the outcome. As I just mentioned at Business Logs I don’t have a legal team, I don’t have a fancy office, and I sure as hell don’t have (or want!) gigantic multi-national companies as clients, but I do have email, I do have my blog, and I do have 9rules, and I think the combination of those three is pretty darn powerful.

A big thanks to everybody for participating in the mashup contest, reading the entries, linking, digging, or just being on the sidelines and giving us support.