My favorite part about our submission rounds are the metrics we can pull:

• For the first 12 hours of this round, we’ve averaged more than 1 new submission every minute (!!) bringing the current total as of 12:31pm eastern time to 908.
• We reached 100 submissions in 12 minutes vs. it taking about 2 hours in Round 4
• We reached 500 submissions twice as fast as in Round 4
• Our entry announcing Round 5 now has 98 total comments and trackbacks.
• Our last 5 entries at the 9rules Blog are averaging over 20 comments per entry.

What I love about this round is the variety of blogs being submitted… blogs on every topic we currently cover and a lot more, Blogger blogs, Squidoo blogs, WordPress blogs, Typepad blogs, it’s a gigantic cross section of the blog world. Stay tuned at the 9rules Blog for the latest information and also to see who wins our submission number game!

9rules is focused on content, but what exactly is this content and who is producing it? This new version of 9rules has essentially three different types of focused, topical content available for readers to check out:

Member Articles
The foundation of 9rules is based around our strong network of members (now at 260+) and the great content they generate. Members are organized into Communities (Programming, Entertainment, Comics, etc.) and their blog entries are aggregated in two main areas: the homepage and on their Community pages. Out of the 260 members about 20% will publish an entry on any given day, so throughout all 7 days of the week we have fresh content from our members. We don’t try to suck readers in with internal 9rules links to their content — we link directly to their articles and sites to maximize the traffic going there.

Featured Blog Articles
Our 9rules Featured Blog is a weblog run on the 9rules site that is written and edited by members. The entries are categorized by Community and focus on great content throughout the Network (written by other members) and the blogosphere (written by anybody.) We have individual Featured Blogs for each Community, with all the entries aggregated into our main Featured Blog and on the homepage.

9rules Notes
9rules Notes is our brand new, third type of content. Notes is based on normal forum software, however each individual forum thread and reply is styled to look like a normal weblog entry, so it appears as though you’re writing blog entries that are directly published onto 9rules.com. Each Community has its own Notes section (Design, Photography, etc.) where anyone can post topical entries that show up directly on that Community’s main page. Newly posted or replied to Notes are also featured directly on our homepage, with a direct link to the author’s URL of choice. The Notes installation is pretty basic right now, however full forum functionality will be added soon including user profiles, favorites, RSS feeds, and a lot more.

Circular Value

If the main 9rules site were nothing of any value, then we wouldn’t be drawing any traffic and would therefore not be doing our job which is highlighting (and moving traffic to) 9rules member sites. The premise of our company is that we provide value at our own 9rules.com website — enough to bring visitors in — and then we give them a multitude of ways to explore content and then eventually leave our site and visit a member. Unlike other “portals” (nasty word!) where they try desperately to lock visitors into their site, we make our living moving traffic off our site for the reasons stated above.

There are two basic types of user sessions involved when someone visits 9rules:

• They went to a weblog they liked and started browsing around. After reading some content they found a 9rules leaf logo on the sidebar and decided to click it.
• They go to 9rules.com and browse around, trying to find a site. They visit some Communities, read some entry titles, and then click on a title to visit a member blog.

We have to provide enough functionality and value on 9rules.com to 1) let 9rules readers find a blog they want to read, and 2) have people who come to the site for the first time (presumably by clicking on a member’s leaf logo) find enough things they like to keep coming back. With member entries, Featured articles, and now Notes, we have three different types of topical content ready for them to check out.

Design Growth, or, You Can’t Stay Web 2.0 Forever

Some of the feedback we’re receiving about this new design mentions that our new look isn’t as “Web 2.0″ as before, and we’re taking that as a huge plus. Gone are the light pastels and the rounded corners; new design features include darker colors and a focus on functionality instead of superfluous design elements. The new design actually harkens back to our design from June of last year, back when we only had about 30 members. Replace 30 members with 30 communities and you’ve got a design that’s similar architecturally. We truly had to ditch the old design because if you broke the pixels down you’d see that we wasted a lot of screen real estate on non-content elements like gigantic rounded headers, huge RSS pull boxes, and rounded containers. Too much talk and not enough walk, and every single design iteration we go through we try to fit as much “walk” in as we can.

In this new homepage design, there are no superfluous design elements that aren’t there for a purpose: decisions guided the placement of every pixel, and every pixel has meaning. Our focus is now on Communities so naturally we needed a way to get users into a specific Community as fast as possible, and the list navigation on the top was the best way we came up with. A dropdown hides options, an inline link list is difficult to skim, and if we skipped the list it would take two clicks for a user to find the subject they want. Also, on the bottom of every page (except the homepage) is another community browser for quick access no matter where they are.

We thought pretty hard about this design, simply because we know this architecture and design will be staying with us for awhile as we grow out our new features. Here are a few small design elements you might not have noticed:

• Colors matter. Green titles are for blog entries, red titles are for the Featured blog, and blue titles are for Notes. On a Community page we use the same color scheme to denote the sections of content on the page, without resorting to large colored boxes or vertically wasteful and gigantic headers.
• Member focused. One of the problems we’ve had in the past (and still have to some extent) is unrelated content. A member might write about Apple 70% of the time and be a member of the Apple Community, but the other 30% they’re probably writing about their job, or what they ate for lunch, or the car they just bought. The way our site was setup, all those entries would get dropped into “Latest Entries” for the Apple Community, and it would throw off readers looking for entries about Leopard or the iPod nano. We contemplated some advanced filtering techniques, category RSS feeds, member tagging, 9rules site pinging, but in the end we found none of those really solved the problem, and that was that we were highlighting the wrong thing. A quick entry title may have absolutely nothing to do with what the entry is about, and readers won’t figure that out until after they click. What we did in this new version is highlight members and member sites instead of simply the “Latest Entries” from a given community. Now we have member listings with a screenshot, some member information (profiles are coming!), and the last 5 posts from the member, all of which let the reader make a more informed choice about just where they’ll be placing their outbound click.
• Notes Tagging. We’ve silently implemented tagging into 9rules Notes just so we can observe and tweak before we yell it from the rooftops (which we won’t do anyway.) It’s useful because a tag can span across multiple Communities, so it’s a quick meta-search for people looking for very specific content. Here’s the “web” tag with my cartoonish-looking title :)

So there you have it! New design, new features, smarter layout, and more functionality. Good stuff :)

When blogging was still in its infancy it was thought of as a waste of time with no business value. Over the past few years however, people are now labeling it “the new journalism” because individual bloggers have broken news stories that traditional journalists might have overlooked or where afraid to touch. While others may still be comparing blogging to journalism, I see weblogs as far surpassing journalism for many reasons, but the most simple reason is that there’s no middle-man between you and your readers.

Many consider “problogging” to be the internet’s equivalent to freelance journalism, where you’re hired to write for other people who control the medium by which your message gets out to the world, but I think that’s pigeonholing the potential of blogs. That freelance writing mentality and workflow worked back when it was expensive to own printing presses and equipment (previously the only way to get your written word out to the world) but weblogs put the power squarely into the author’s hands, for good or for bad. You don’t need a printing press or support technicians anymore because if you own a weblog then you’re in charge of the entire thing: from writing to editing to publishing. Blogs give you the power to cut out the middle man, talk straight to your readers, and build your personal brand and profile.

In the same way that building a successful company from scratch is exciting, so too is building a weblog and your personal brand into something people recognize. That entrepreneurial spirit embodies all bloggers who start from scratch and want to build their audience, because running your own blog is akin to owning your own printing house: something that wasn’t truly feasible until right now.

The official entry received over 50 trackbacks, and my Feedster and Technorati feeds for the “9rules” query blew up with hundreds more hits from bloggers who talked about the list. It seemed like I couldn’t go anywhere in the blogosphere this weekend without reading about 9rules — a concept and feeling that is fantastic considering all the hard work the team and I (and the members) have put in over the past year or so.

We may not have a Techcrunch profile, San Francisco offices, open bar parties, or 7 figures of VC money, but we do have thousands of people who want to join the 9rules Network along with a massive group of evangelists who support us 100%, and I wouldn’t trade those in for anything else in the world.

As Paul noted, we were at 1 submission every minute for the first hour, and after 9 hours we were at over 290 sites. Now we’re far past that, and will be easily surpassing the previous round record of 509 blogs to set a new “record” for us. Pretty exciting if you’re a member of 9rules, a reader, or just a fan :)

What’s 9rules you ask?

“The 9rules Network is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof.”

This past Fall, when we had Round III of submissions, 509 weblogs applied to join 9rules and I expect a lot more this round. The benefits of joining are discussed at the 9rules About page. We only accept the weblogs that meet our “high quality” criteria, namely consistency, user experience, and audience participation to name a few. So get ready to submit!

Design is something I could never see myself stopping, regardless of what else I have going on in my life or how much money I had. To me, putting pixels on the screen is like playing golf — nobody pays me to play golf, and I don’t care, I’ll play golf the rest of my life. It’s the same type of thing with design, if I was a multi-millionaire and never had to work again, I’d probably be designing more stuff than I am currently just because I love it so much.

Today’s announcement at 9rules about our next big project — 9charities.org — is the big picture stuff that I’m really looking forward to. 9charities is our way of using the resources of the 9rules Network to give free web consulting, hosting, and design to nine non-profit organizations per year. Our members will be divided up into teams, and each team will work with a charitable organization and provide them with the professional web presences they desperately need. I’ll be sticking my head in some of the projects and giving visual direction, just because I like getting my hands dirty like that :) 9charities will have a much larger impact on people’s lives than the 9rules Network does, which to me is the real big picture: the impact that 9rules and our members will have on the world around us.

Some 9charities-related links that have popped up already (Update: I’m adding to this list as I find them!). Thanks for the great support everyone:

• Dennis Bullock: 9rules Spreads Love With 9charities
• Snook: 9charities
• Newsvine: 9charities
• Totanus.net: 9rules e il non profit
• Juiced Thoughts: 9charities, a 9rules Network Project
• Mark Wade: Announcing 9charities!
• Tauquil’s Blog: 9rules Introduces 9charities
• Judi Sohn: 9charities (great post from a brilliant woman)
• João Craveiro: 9charities
• Danny Foo: 9rules Network Giving Back To 9charities
• Yaro Starak: 9charities.org

First, we won the SXSW Web Award for Best Community Site of the Year on Sunday night, and now today we announce that venture capitalist and brilliant business mind Guy Kawasaki has joined the 9rules Network. Read the launch entry over at the 9rules blog.

And boy do we have some more cool stuff coming down the pipe real soon ;)

Rockstar Matt Linderman (aka Matt Ruby) from 37signals wrote a great post talking about how 37s methodology and advice is simply just advice, and not meant to be a straight-up guide to running your business. I’m not sure how people are getting confused and taking everything they say at face-value; oh well, that’s the “value” of the internet.

Jigga Fried kills it in his critique of web 2.0 applications cum businesses working with no business plan:

“It’s about value — something the new web set seems afraid to 1. create, and 2. charge for. I don’t know why people are afraid to charge for their services, but here are a few ideas: 1. they don’t think they’re good enough, 2. they are afraid to offend some people, 3. they think profit and idealism don’t mix, and 4. peer pressure (“come on, man, everyone’s doing the free”). What are the other reasons?”

Exactly, don’t be afraid to actually charge money for something you worked hard on. I don’t care how loud the “everything free” mantra of “web 2.0″ is sung from the Valley, a company that doesn’t figure out how to draw revenues from the onset is dead in the water. 9rules has been making money for awhile, and while some are awaiting our master revenue plan, we’ve been plugging along with ad space that easily pays the bills while we work on the other 95% of the pie. Build it and they will come ;)

Russell Beattie says WTF 2.0 and calls bullshit on companies with no real business strategies. Russell says that online calendars and Ajax homepages are lame, and I happen to agree. He continues:

“But let’s think of some of the popular new site launches lately… web chat and IM comes to mind. WTF is the business? All those Map mashups out there? WTF is the business? Calendaring and Ajax desktops? WTF is the business? They’re just FEATURES built on top of other company’s APIs, adding very little real value, and not making a dime of profit.”

Exactly. Yes, building an online calendar is a cool and a worthwhile effort, but in the long-term where is the true value and the true revenue? If one calendar company starts charging for their calendar, some bushy-tailed 16-year old Ruby on Rails genius is going to two-step that company and build his own calendar — but his will be free and 5x faster. Colin and I could build a damn online calendar this weekend considering there are no barriers to enter the market. Whatever, as soon as Google drops their calendar in a week or so, all bets are off and VCs are going to start sweating like a dog in a chinese restaurant.

Edgeio has launched and the reviews are pouring in (I still am not sure how to pronounce it!). Keith Teare from Edgeio dropped this little nugget in a comment over at the Crizzunch:

“If edgeio was only for educated taggers I think I would share your scepticism, but don’t confuse the initial positioning with the product vision. We made a decision to focus on bloggers who tag for the first 30 days or so. After that we will release tools for Bloggers who do not tag. Follwed by tools for non-bloggers.”

I’m psyched, I think that’s a great move. I’m always a sucker for companies who target people who don’t know their WordPress from their TextPattern, and I think Arrington and his Edgeio crew are doing just that. Another exciting launch that should be coming any day now is my friend Clarence Wooten’s CollectiveX group-centric communication platform. He said that we 9rules folk would get a sneak peek for usage with our 130+ members, so I’m sure that’ll be a blast. I’ve seen the initial design prototypes and they look fly, I’m excited to check them out for real.

Tomorrow Apple Computer is announcing some cool new products. My bet is on an iPod boombox (iPod Hi-Fi?), updated MacBooks to replace the aging iBook, and maybe even some type of iPod-looking touch screen thingie to coincide with all their new UI patents.

The guys and I at 9rules have been laying low the past week or so, and when that happens you can usually guess that something big is coming soon :) Our Network has an extremely high concentration of great web designers and developers, so when we all put our minds together we can come up with some cool stuff. Soon we’ll be launching a few new applications/services that will reside outside the 9rules.com website, with our members at their helm. These will be the first of a few member collaborations that have been in the works for awhile now, so we’re psyched to finally move forward. Hint: 9____.com and 9_________.org :)

We’re very excited to have her aboard, not only because she has given us some great business advice in the past, but also because she successfully ran an extremely large online gaming community a few years back so she knows precisely what she’s talking about. Welcome Tyme!

9rules Ad Network

Paul was interviewed the day of our big 9rules launch by well-known marketing site ClickZ News, and in that interview Paul happened to drop the bomb:

“Our framework allows for a number of possibilities, but most importantly it is helping us lead into the ad network that we will be launching this year for our member sites,” Scrivens told ClickZ News. “In everything we do, we have our members and readers in mind first and foremost. These changes will make the 9rules Network even more useful for our readers. For advertisers what this will mean is targeted advertising on a number of blogs that they can count on being high-quality.”

It’s true, we’re indeed launching an advertising network. This platform will allow advertisers to reach out to our highly influential 9rules community, and target the very best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. This next step has been in the works for awhile now, however we didn’t want to divulge our plans until 1) 9rules Communities was launched, and 2) our members were fully aware of our intentions. Now that things are moving smoothly ahead, we thought it the right time to tell people of our plans.

Other marketing sites that picked up on the story include MarketingVOX, AdJab, Buy it or DIE!, and a few others. We’ve already been approached by some large ad purchasing companies to see what the dealio is. Things are definitely off and running.

9rules Communities

Right now, our private 9rules member forum gets about 30-40 new posts every single day by our members, so it’s most definitely thriving. For those outside the network looking in, it’s difficult to see the camaraderie formed, but the excitement of our members in the forums is palpable. Some of our members have landed full-time jobs because of connections made through 9rules, others have started new projects/companies, some others have gotten free site redesigns or technical help, and even others have landed nice client gigs too. We wanted to bring that kind of community-like atmosphere to 9rules in a big way, and 9rules Communities is a great start.

9rules Communities lets people dive into the 9rules members and their content in a whole new way — you can peruse the Technology Community to read about the latest tech mergers, go to the Movies Community to read the latest reviews, and a whole lot more. We realize that there are myriad topics covered by 9rules members (30+) so we think that bringing related sites closer helps both their members and our readers.

Another feature you might have noticed about 9rules Communities is that we are now caching member content right on our site. No, we will never be publishing the full entry (right now we publish about 200 characters for each I believe) but we are working on some cool things that will help our members out with traffic on a per-post basis. Another good thing about caching member content on our servers is that we can now index entries for searching purposes, as well as run automated scripts against them to pull out certain keywords, phrases, and tags that might be helpful to their readers. We’re working with our members right now about ways to help them out in that regard, and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Our mantra has always been “content is king”, and the bucket-loads of content we have access to now opens up a ton of great possibilities.

9rules Featured

To coincide with 9rules Communities, we now have a new area called 9rules Featured, which are weblogs written by members that highlight Community-specific content from around the Network and the web. Think of them as a type of “best of” of 9rules content, category-specific, and totally human-edited.

9rules Featured is what I’m the most excited about, because it really gives our members the additional spotlight and exposure that they’re looking for. 9rules member extraordinaire Benedict Eastaugh is now heading up the 9rules Philosophy Blog, and he’s got some really cool plans in store for his Philosophy Community. Ben will be able to spearhead the 9rules Philosophy efforts, get some community-buliding stuff going on, feature great philosophy content from around the web, and hopefully get some great new philosophy blogs to join the fun.

Right now we only have 6 different Featured blogs, but that number will be rapidly expanding over the next few days and weeks once we get our members set-up with Featured blog accounts. I anticipate the larger categories (Design, Business, etc.) to have multiple Community leaders, and therefore some fantastic content on their associated Featured blogs. My friend Scott described 9rules Featured blogs as “weblogs that blog the Network” and I think that’s a great way to think of them. Once we get some more Featured blogs up and running, 9rules will have even more great, original content to add to our growing member base. I can’t wait to see how our Community leaders like their new digs.

What’s Coming

The Community and Featured launches are merely the beginning — they were basically a big test of our new content caching infrastructure made possible by our resident Jedi programmer Colin Devroe and our friends at (mt) Media Temple. Now that we have 9rules spiders going out every few minutes to re-index member content, the doors are now completely open as to where we can go next.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be unveiling a new homepage that does justice to the great member content, Communities, and Featured blogs. The current page doesn’t take advantage of our new infrastructure, so something more useful is definitely in order. Around that time we’ll be rolling out our new feed offerings, so that readers can subscribe to basically any section of 9rules they choose. Subscribe to individual Communities, Featured blogs, groupings of members, or basically anything else you could want to stay on top of. I’m a big Bloglines user, so this will let me stay on top of our members and all of their content much easier. I can’t wait.

Other things that are coming soon include profile pages for each 9rules member, better archive organization (view our members’ archives on 9rules.com? no way!), more synchronization with our friend Dave Pell’s company Rollyo, a more dynamic submission area, some additional functionality for Communities and Featured, and a whole lot more. We’ve been accused recently of not divulging our plans for all to see, but what can I say, we didn’t want to spoil any surprises. Steve Jobs never lets anybody know what’s coming next, so we thought we’d take some cues from the master and keep our mouths shut as well. All that matters is that our members are happy, and right now, they couldn’t be happier.

Update! Round 3 is all over, and we STOMPED our previous rounds by having more than 500 people submit their sites! Amazing! Paul has more »

Now the submission page is open until midnight eastern time, and so far we’ve received hundreds of submissions from people who want to join our Network. Fantastic. If you want to join a grouping of the best weblogs on the planet (who just added Om Malik’s Gigaom.com to the membership list!) please submit your weblog in the next few hours.

Thanks and good luck!

Read all about the 3rd round at the 9rules Blog.

I Love Skittles

One of the first things you’ll notice about this design is that it’s really colorful, really bright, and really different than the previous one. The old design (seen here on the blog, soon to be updated to match) was cool, but it was so dark that certain non-content areas overpowered the parts we wanted to highlight. The previous design also featured a muted version of our colorful 9rules logo, and since many people asked me if we could highlight it a bit more on this design, I gladly complied.

Because the logo is given a pretty prominent position atop the design now, I wanted to extend the 9rules color palette to other areas of the site as well. The bright orange, green, and yellow color choices have morphed into the new tag section, the featured articles area, and the header respectively. Our logo is colorful because it represents the many sides to the growing 9rules community, and we wanted to express that design decision through the rest of the site, paying homage to our diverse selection of members.

Features

Our main goal for the new 9rules.com site, and the subsections and features that follow, is that we wanted to present users with a tutorial-free and app-less web application that leverages the tremendous amount of information our members create. In the previous version, we only displayed a random selection of members, and their previous entries.

In this version, you can load the same list of random entries, but can refresh that random sampling without reloading the entire page. We got lots of requests for a way for users to view just the very latest 9rules content, so we dropped that in as well in the “Recent” tab. We got some more requests from non-tech savvy friends who wanted to keep track of their favorite 9rules members without resorting to RSS feeds, so we added a killer My Favorites feature that lets you add/remove members from your My Favorites section wherever they’re listed, effortlessly. No login, no signup, just start favoriting and it’ll work off the bat and store your favorites for the next time you come back.

The biggest feature request from the previous version is that people couldn’t find the sites they wanted, so we definitely fixed that. You can now move through our 9rules members by keyword/tag, or you can search for a name and we present the results in real-time. Then you can subscribe to their RSS feed, add them as a favorite, or just go ahead and visit their site. Colin pulled this off flawlessly, and I couldn’t be happier.

9rules Spanish

The most important feature of this redesign is that we are now fully internationalized. Check out 9rules Spanish for all the same features that we afford the English members, but for our growing Spanish community. We have lots more language-specific features to roll out, but this is just a preview. A big thanks go out to our Spanish members who stuck with us and were patient throughout the redesign!

Bugs, and Looking Forward

The design isn’t perfect yet — it has some bugs in IE6, but we’re on them. If you can believe it, the vast majority of our readers come through with either Firefox or Safari, so those users are our most important. We dropped this knowing full well that IE6 has some render issues, and that’s fine by me, we’ll get em fixed soon.

Apart from the favorites, tagging, language switcher, and other goodies, this redesign represents a monumental move forward for our infrastructure that powers 9rules. The code behind it, and the new design framework, lets us move forward with our other plans for 9rules. Even though we don’t reveal our future plans often, rest assured knowing that the new 9rules.com homepage is a tiny portion of what we’re currently working on for 9rules, Inc. The great thing about the new design/infrastructure is we can roll out features and change much quicker than before, so expect iterations starting soon. Or today, since we already dropped member name search at the bottom courtesy some feedback from our buddy Britt :)

So what do you guys think? Now that I explained our rationale a bit, maybe some of our choices might make more sense, or maybe they won’t. Hate the design, love it, hate the new features, love em, please let us know. We cater to our 80+ members just as we cater to our audience, so comment away!

We are looking for all types of content-based websites and if your site is different from what we currently offer our readers then even better.

There have been a couple of great discussions concerning the 9rules Network, but the best one to date was started by Matthew Pennell. The entry and the comments go into great detail as to what the network is about and how everyone is starting to view it. If you would like an inside perspective on how things are going for members then you might be interested in Darice’s perspective.

Do not think that the network is only for personal blogs or blogs run by individuals. Some company blogs do more than hold their own with regards to quality content and would be a perfect fit for the network.

The submission page is where all the magic happens.

So go check it out and tell us what you think!