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Everybody, it’s Tyme’s birthday today, and I wanted to officially make this known on the 9rules Blog to get maximum exposure. Happy Birthday, Tyme!

I’m sure it’s completely no surprise to anyone that Tyme has been doing an unbelievable amount of work here the past few months and our latest membership round would have been dead-on-arrival without her managing the whole thing.  She’s always been on top of our membership rounds but this latest one was something special for us, and she did a marvelous job. If you want to know why going through all of the sites went exponentially smoother than it has in previous rounds, you can simply look to Tyme. She did a great job.

9rules and our new sites would not be the same unless she was here working her butt off on them.

I don’t know how she manages to do it, but every year I’ve known her she happens to turn 29 over and over.  Now that’s a feat I’m jealous of.

Happy Birthday!

9rules member James Woodcock asked us for an interview months ago. We were swamped switching 9rules back to member only content and launching the Chawlk subsites so we didn’t have time to do the interview when he asked. James was patient with us (thank you James!) and The Triad got up at 7am to do the interview. o_O We owed it to James for his patience.

We talked about how 9rules began, the changes we’ve made to the site, answered the question “Are you still using WordPress as the backend?” (hint: funny story behind that one), how we see the internet evolving - fun stuff.

You can download/listen to the interview here. It’s 52:05 minutes long.

Thanks James!

Just a quick heads up that I will be sending out emails tomorrow to the new members to begin the setup process. I will make an update to this entry once all the emails are sent out. I keep track of who has been processed and who hasn’t so if, at the end, there are sites missing I will send out a second email.

I also responded to all of the “why wasn’t my site accepted” emails I received. If you didn’t receive my response let me know and I’ll resend it. I enjoyed interacting with all of you.

That’s it. Have a great week everyone!

Update May 29, 2008 6:49pm EST: All the emails have been sent out. If you did not receive it let me know (along with your domain name).

Update June 3, 2008 4:32pm EST: I’ve added all the new members that I received a response from. If you haven’t received my email with instructions to get your site set up or responded and haven’t heard from me, let me know.

If you watched the stream where we went through the sites you’ll remember some were accepted…but we couldn’t say who they were. I thought I would share some of them…and announce a couple that I had questions on and they responded:

http://vocino.com/: This is the one where I said I look forward to watching him grow as a blogger. I like the innocent (enthusiastic) perspective he has towards some of his entries. So often we are filled with the “expert” authoritative perspective, which is fine, but it’s not the “only” perspective.

http://happysoda.com: This was the site I was looking at when my eyes popped. We had a cryptic conversation about anime.

http://desktopvibes.com/: When I said, “Wow, he’s all grown up!” I was talking about Glenn. He was 14 when he first started with 9rules.

That’s all that I can recall of the stream where I could spark your memory. So, without further ado - the members that were accepted in the stream and a couple I got confirmation information from:

http://bignanime.wordpress.com
http://desktopvibes.com/
http://educatedeviate.wordpress.com/
http://www.happysoda.com
http://omaemo.dasaku.net/
http://shapeshed.com/journal
http://vocino.com/

I may have a couple of others. As I said, I sent emails out with questions prior to announcing the list. Didn’t want to keep anyone waiting!

As promised, we’re announcing the blogs that were accepted for 9rules membership from Round 6. We will not be releasing statistics on how many sites submitted, the percentage of sites accepted vs. submitted, etc. This moment is about those sites that were accepted without the drain of analytical observations.

The sites we did not accept basically fell into several broad categories:

• The site was new: We require at least six months of consistent posting. We received submissions for some awesome sites that were too new to accept. Please resubmit your site in August so the guys and I can drool over them again. I cannot stress enough to resubmit. If you want to know if your site falls into this category please do not hesitate to contact me at tyme@9rules.com.
• Content was a mashup of another entry: I talked about this in a previous article. An example: “Scrivs wrote about People Differentiation on 3by9. It’s a cool topic, check it out!” We aren’t looking for those types of entries. However, it is wonderful to be inspired by an article and add your own twist and original content. We did not accept blogs that mashup content from other sites.
• Bad navigation: If you watched the stream where we went through sites you saw an example of us clicking through sites trying to find archives, a contact page or just navigate through the site. A reader will not take that much time trying to find what they are looking for. They’ll go to the next site.
• No focus: The author of the blog used their blog to randomly dump information. Every blogger has their own style but our readers are looking for more focused content where the blog has a clear direction on the content being published.

Those are the main reasons. If you have any questions about your blog, let me know. For the sites we had questions on, I’ve already sent out the emails. I will be contacting the new members next week to get your sites set up.

Here is the list of accepted sites before you guys kill me. Congrats!

Round 6 Accepted Sites

http://www.aliedwards.typepad.com/
http://anime.osiristeam.net
http://armenthomassian.com/
http://badassideas.com/blog/
http://basugasubakuhatsu.com/blog/
http://blinkdagger.com/
http://blog.littlerockjams.com/
http://brajeshwar.com/
http://cameraporn.net/
http://cypherhackz.net/
http://deepesthealth.com
http://deliciousasianfood.com
http://designchronicle.com/memento/
http://designingthenews.com
http://dietriffic.com/
http://dotconnector.wordpress.com
http://elitebydesign.com
http://escapefromcubiclenation.com/
http://evomend.net
http://f1fanatic.co.uk
http://frozentoothpaste.com/
http://hellyeahdude.com
http://higevsotaku.com
http://intheknowtraveler.com
http://joshsanimeblog.com/
http://justenough.wordpress.com
http://kitchenparade.com/
http://lessoninlife.com
http://liewcf.com
http://marcandangel.com
http://marketingpilgrim.com/
http://maximummotorsport.co.uk
http://moetron.com/
http://msadventuresinitaly.com/blog/
http://myfla.ws
http://nothingbutgreenlights.net/
http://organizeit.co.uk/
http://panelsofawesome.com/
http://pr-squared.com
http://quickonlinetips.com
http://shamefulotakusecret.com/
http://shapeshed.com/journal
http://slowleadership.org
http://srichinmoybio.co.uk/blog/
http://sushiday.com/
http://that.animeblogger.net
http://thegeneticgenealogist.com/
http://thenext45years.com
http://twonotesahead.wordpress.com/
http://webmaster-source.com
http://whisperingcraneinstitute.wordpress.com/
http://wyblog.us/