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New additions: 12-11-06
Written by Mike Rundle on December 11, 2006
Another day and another few new 9rules members to welcome!
StartCooking.com | feed
Ask Patty | feed
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
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December 11th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
Wooowooo! It’s good to see things that you guys don’t like in blogs.
Here’s hoping for more “new additions” posts!:)
December 11th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
Congrats, you two.
(Luckies.)
I’m more estatic to see that I don’t violate any of the “pointers.” I’m still waiting — keep the dream alive!
December 11th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Congrats to the lucky two today! I’ve been refreshing this blog obsessively daily to see who gets in. This is more nailbiting than watching who wins America’s Next Top Model.
Mike, I’m glad you posted some of the reasons for denial. All the characteristics you noted seem to fall under one overarching reason for not letting sites in: lack of passion.
What’s great about members of 9rules is that they are all passionate about what they write about. It’s what makes me excited to see who gets in and also bit hopeful for the chance of being part of this community.
December 11th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
Congrats to all who have gotten in so far!
Q: Will 9rules ever allow webcomics to be submitted? I think thats an untapped category although this is our 2nd time submitting I’m just not sure if 9rules will ever consider them as a featured category…
December 11th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
I understand you guys liking consistency, but what if a gap was caused by computer trouble? My Mac recently died and caused a bit of a gap in my posting, which I explained in a blog post a few days back. Would that hurt someone’s chances of getting in?
Sorry, but I can’t help but ask.
December 11th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
Unfortunately, lacking passion may make it easier to take waiting for 2 months to find out if you got in or not! Checking my newsreader every 5 minutes in the afternoon is enough to a drive a soul to drink.
December 11th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
Only 2 blogs? This does not bode well for me. (You proboably looked at mine today) Let me see about those requirements:
Writing - consistently since September
Gaps - only once for vacation
Videos - only one YouTube video
Long quotes - I don’t use quotes very often and always provide interpretation
Splogs - certainly not; I don’t even have ads
Blog - Yup, it is a blog. Although I do have some static writing
Now if only these were the only things that mattered…
December 11th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
I think it all boils down to how much respect we have for weblogs as a medium and a platform for reaching out to people. I always cringe when I see people abusing blogs and just using them to make money writing about topics they don’t like, but maybe that’s just me lol.
As for the posting absences, we always look to see if there’s an explanation post because we know things come up. We’d never dismiss a blog if they had legitimate reasons for a gap so don’t worry.
December 11th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Geez, hopefully my blog will be seen as innocent of the above no-no’s. I have Google and Amazon ad banners, and one of my posts had a YouTube video.
My only crime might be that my blog is only two months old. Hopefully my passion shines through.
December 11th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
Mike orginal content kicks A$$!
congrats.. you too!
December 11th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
I definently am passionate about what I write and am not trying to just make money or get more readers. However, that does not automatically make my blog a good one. Even though I have tremendous respect for blogging and bloggers, that does not make me a good blogger. If that was all it took, most of the blogs on the net would be good blogs.
P.S. I really love startcooking.com - subscribed immediately allthough I must confess the real reason was because I loved the design, whoever did it - speak up!
December 11th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
Thanks Mike for reminding us all of your guys’ commitment to quality and passion in blogging.
Meanwhile, you doing a great job of keeping thousands of us on the edge of our feed readers.
December 11th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Gah, just my like.
Just had a job change and have spent three weeks bouncing around the country doing system deployments. Timing, eh.
The list looks great so far, all the same!
December 11th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
Make that luck.
December 11th, 2006 at 7:57 pm
using the quote as your entry isn’t really the way to go and could get you into some copyright troubles.
Well, I guess I’m out of the running. And my lawyer will not be pleased, either.
December 11th, 2006 at 8:00 pm
Glad to see some of the reasons for denying sites. The next few days should prove to be quite interesting.
Out of curiosity, in what order are you looking at the sites? Are you browsing the sites based on the order submitted or some other methodology?
In any event, I can imagine how busy you guys are and how difficult it is to sift through the “noise” in order to find blogs that you consider 9rules-worthy.
December 11th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Congrats new members!
December 11th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
kimonostereo: I think there are web comics in 9rules…well actually only one. http://chipcullen.com/ is part of the comic community.
December 11th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
Wow! I do feel like I won top model of the bloggesphere!
Thank you 9Rules!
Jody DeVere
Ask Patty — Automotive Advice for Women
December 11th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
Huh. Interesting site. One of your new members notified me about it and I can see why: there’s not only a lot of different subjects but bloggers who are passionate about their blogs and the craft of writing each posts.
I’ll place a bookmark to see when the next submission period begins. Keep up the good work!
December 11th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
i hate it when people use their blogs primarily to pay for their household bills. a block of adsense or TLA is enough just to cover the webhosting cost.
i hate ads so i try to minimize them on my site
anyhoooo
i love that cooking blog
December 11th, 2006 at 9:20 pm
Yeah sorry Chris, don’t let the door hit ya on the way out
;)
Scott, we’re going in (pseudo) reverse chronological order so we’re starting our way from the back and maneuvering in a somewhat random fashion. I remember you submitted pretty early on though, so we haven’t gotten to yours yet.
December 11th, 2006 at 9:37 pm
Reverse chron order! Yikes. You realize don’t you, Mike, that all the anxious, anal, obsessive people submitted their sites in the first ten seconds after you opened up for submissions. If they have to wait until you get to them via reverse chronological order they might not survive the suspense. Does that include me? Not saying. I’m too busy biting my fingernails.
December 11th, 2006 at 9:40 pm
See how he talks to me? I don’t get no respect, I tell ya.
December 11th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
After you have finished with Round 5, could you take a quick look at my blog and tell me if I have placed too many ads on it? I have included the link in the website portion of this form and my name should be clickable to reach my site.
December 11th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
Mike: Many thanks.
Good luck with all the submissions.
December 11th, 2006 at 10:50 pm
Congrats to both
December 11th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
You see Chris, because of that mean girlfriend of yours, you get the door to the ass… I think Mike and Annie are conspiring against you… muhahaha… and doom doom doom as well
and back on topic now, big congrats to the new members of 9rules.
December 11th, 2006 at 11:18 pm
I hope you guys aren’t mistaking real outside work for lack of passion–especially when the real work ties into what the blog is about. Just because there’s advertising on a site doesn’t mean that it makes any money, therefore the paid work has to come first. Some of us have a lot to bring to this community, but we also have outside obligations like work and family.
December 12th, 2006 at 12:05 am
The cooking videos are so stylish! I love it. I love food too (^-^)v
Congrats.
How many more to go through Chirs? Big job.
Camomile tea is good for computer overloaded work.
I hope my blog makes people feel good.
December 12th, 2006 at 12:14 am
Mistake! I wrote Chirs! I meant Mike. Sorry.
December 12th, 2006 at 2:11 am
Start Cooking looks like a great site.
December 12th, 2006 at 2:21 am
“Long quotes, little interpretation”
… but sometimes that is the point? I mean when I go to quote sites or I am looking at funny daily jokes or what not I don’t want commentary. Sometimes the beauty is in personal interpretation and not every blog has to rip apart something. I guess it is easier to understand in the context of my site - about music lyrics. I have always found the beauty to be in the reading and listening to the words. I could go into the personal significance each song has to me but why would I? That’s not the point of music - in my humble opinion. It’s so personal each person has a different emotion evoked by the same song. Why force an idea? It isn’t about politics - there is no persuasive goal.
I obviously respect dissent from my view, but this IS my view. Thank you.
December 12th, 2006 at 4:06 am
@Ralph: i hate it when people use their blogs primarily to pay for their household bills.
The knowledge based economy is worth billions and information drives the web so getting paid for experimenting, reporting, researching and writing about a particular topic is viable and just. It’s when sponsorship and advertising form the content, then the quality suffers.
December 12th, 2006 at 5:05 am
How come nobody is discussing the rules of 9rules?
Everybody seems to say “yes” and “ahh” and “congrats”.
December 12th, 2006 at 5:19 am
We are all winners !!!!
And congrats., to the official winners.
December 12th, 2006 at 10:24 am
Hey Kyle, I just shot you an email going into more depth but the short answer is no, definitely not “too many ads”. I was talking about sites that have more ads than content, but we’re 100% behind our members who want to make money off their popular blogs.
ptvGuy, I semi-answered your question when talking to Kyle, but we’d never penalize a member who makes money from their site if they’re writing about things they love. My comment was referencing blogs that are started because of the high-paying AdSense keywords they could pull in, not because they actually love the subject. These are mostly the spam blogs, or splogs, that you see reposting other blogs’ articles with no attribution back.
Ayumi, we’ve got a bunch left
Hey Zach, I sent you an email too, but I was referencing sites that steal content from other blogs and have little to no original thoughts of their own, usually in an effort to have their AdSense blocks have a particular topic in them. You have to be on the “evil side” of the quoting to get knocked in our book, so normal sites have nothing to worry about.
Milo, what do you mean? As a community we really don’t have many rules — keep up the good work that you’ve been doing, do your best to participate in the community via our forums and Notes, and help out others if they need it — they’re not particularly difficult to abide by
December 12th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Blog = Personnnnnal Opinion
December 12th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
This doesn’t sound very good for my site even if it did make it this far, but if did get this far and hasn’t come up yet although the dates of the posts look really odd, it is only because I had to repost individual articles after a crash. I hope that explains the August to November jump with several articles posted on the 5th.
December 12th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
@Aaron
Same thing happened to me 2 weeks after the submission my webhost exploded and deleted everything including my wp and bbpress databases. I moved to (mt) and thank god i have 1/4 of my entries saved on writely aka docs.google
so my old site pinkprankradio.com is now redirected to my new site ralphdagza.com
December 12th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
First, thank you guys for defining the rules. It makes me feel more at… well… err… It makes me feel *something*, I just don’t know what. Regarding the rules — hmm…. let’s think here:
1) Writing a lot in October, not as much in November: Well, I guess I violated that (though the past 2 years of blogging might serve as a nice counterweight) since I’ve been sick and/or out of town, therefore unable to blog. (Hope you guys don’t count against that.) October, though, the creative juices were flowing, I tells ya! Flowing!
2) Long gaps in posting: See #1. It is exceedingly rare I go more than a week without posting, usually 5+ posts a week, though they may all avalanche to the first few days due to both creative juices and life.
3) YouTube: Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! This is where I get in trouble, since I tend to put up posts a fair amount of posts with the explicit purpose of featuring a YouTube video I found interesting, most of which are music related (I have a “Music Videos” section on my site) or specifially educational and dealing with whatever I’m most intersted at the moment. In the case of the later, I’ll usually post a number of videos on a topic within one post, for example the TED conference, Bob Woodward and Richard Dawkins are three recent video topics in which I posted on. If anything kills my chances its this. (Do you guys count against this, or do you count against posting for the sake of posting?)
4) Long quotes, little interpretation: Not a problem.
5) Splogs: Not a problem, although I feel I run a lot of advertising on my site. (Maybe I can get someone to critique this for me. I just put what I put in order to make enough money to pay for bandwidth. When you have a blog like mine, adsense revenue is generally not very high: any month in which revenue goes over $10 is a good month.)
6) Static content: Not a problem on the site.
With all this, I still feel OK about my chances, though I feel the lack of a specific focus might do me in. (I’m an expert in one thing: me. Therefore, the blog is about everything I find interesting, which is quite a lot.) Frankly, if you guys had the time (or clones) it’d be nice to hear what your thoughts were about a site regardless of whether the site was accepted into the network or not.
Final question: is commhparticipation mandatory (or even desirable) when it comes to consideration for acceptance? (Obligations post acceptance aside.)
December 12th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
@Aaron and Ralh Dagza:
Always keep local backups of your database and theme files for this exact reason.
We’ve all had database issues or host issues and things get zapped but if you take some control of your site and content with doing regular backups of everything, if you do have an issue, you can recover really well… you might not have everything backed up but doing at least a weekly backup will save you in the long run.
For me, I have a few cron jobs running that back things up on the fly when something changes on my server, so for the most part I have up to the minute backups of my site… yes, maybe a little overdone but after a few disasters myself, I learned my lesson on how important backups are.
December 12th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
@Seanrox
I have copy of my custom themes and styles on my hard drive but not my database. I learned my lesson so i do my backup everyday (not really) especially when i do changes on my sites
I think you should teach me how to do cron jobs
you rock sean
December 12th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Ah, okay. I know I have more content than ads (I try to make an effort to post at least once a day) but I just wanted to be sure.
December 12th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
Many thanks for inviting me to be part of your community! I am so very honored to have been chosen. In this holiday season you have now given me even more reasons to celebrate! Cheers!
December 12th, 2006 at 7:20 pm
@seanrox
Well I had a two month old database backup and a copy of most of the posts in between. Unfortunately when I combined the two it makes it look like there was a two months of inactivity followed by a sudden flood of posts after round 5 submissions..
December 13th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
That would most likely eliminate me then. ha. I am currently involved in a large ecommerce project at work, so my posting isn’t as regular as I would like it to be. Aside from that, I am transitioning to a new site/design/backend, so I am not putting as much effort into my current site as it will be re-launched first of next year. I am only posting book reviews as I get them read.
Ah well….life goes on. Congrats to those on the list.
December 16th, 2006 at 10:01 am
O la la
I am going to be honest, when I was reading this post I saw my self.
Anyway congrats to everyone who made it.
Sonny.
December 20th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
[...] As it turned out, I later learned that my “workmanlike†approach was a benefit. In a December 11 post on the 9rules blog, Mike Rundle let everyone know that a posting spike during the Round 5 submission period followed by a posting lull was as much as a mark of death regarding a blog author’s 9rules Round 5 candidacy. Oh well. [...]