Honestly, I’ve never heard of 9rules until Cyperhack and Liewcf blogged about their acceptation into the 9rules. With such blogs uttering their excitement, I’m curious of what the heck 9rules is. So I gave them a visit. Bearing the slogan “The Best Content From The Independent Web”, are they living to what is expected?
Before that, let’s go the fundamental of 9rules which contains 9 rules (yeah as its name said), taken from its about page. Well, there is nothing new. You may have heard of it somewhere else. But while the rules look simple and sound familiar to the ears, how many of us are really practicing it on our real life… sad to say, neither is myself.
- Love what you do.
- Never stop learning.
- Form works with function.
- Simple is beautiful.
- Work hard, play hard.
- You get what you pay for.
- When you talk, we listen.
- Must constantly improve.
- Respect your inspiration.
At a glance
My first impression of 9rules is, it is one kind of blog aggregator (or collection of blog) of selected blogs which has ‘quality’ contents chosen by 9rules membership, regardless of how much the visitors are. When they’re talking about quality, the quantity of visitors does not matter, so does the pagerank or any other ranks.
It takes quite sometime for me to understand what 9rules is even though initially, there are few things that I’m still quite confuse even after reading their about page. This is resulted from the lack of definition on about page especially on past history of 9rules.
9rules has evolved 3 times since been rolled out 3 years ago
Ali (domain in 9rules.com) -> Ali2 (domain in 9rules.com) -> Existing 9rules + Chawlk (domain in chawlk.com)
9rules
Ali and Ali2 which are the first 2 versions of 9rules get and display contents from members and non members. This is totally different with the current version of 9rules, which has 100% content from its members only whom selected by 9rules membership.
There are 2 types of membership. Similar profile in 9rules can be used in Chawlk
- Reader/Audience – You’re allowed to register at any time. From there you’ll be given a profile page where you can favorite your favorite post, view all related posts of your favorite post and etc
- Member – This is for blog owners and which I intend to join on the next round. Once accepted, your content will be aggegated on 9rules. Readers can start to favorite your content. This is quite cool.
Chawlk
Chawlk is like a sibling of 9rules, but I’m not sure if it is pulling the content from 9rules. Here, you can signup using your 9rules credential. To me, Chawlk looks like a Digg type of website, where you can post links (called as clip) and discussions (called as notes) under categories below which are actually “subsites” of Chawlk. Chawlk will pull and display all contents submitted altogether.
How to join?
What’s special about 9rules is that, it has 24 hour submission process. This make 9rules exclusive. After that period, no more submission is accepted until the next round.
To stay relevant with it’s own rules above, it seems that it is quite tough for personal blogs or blogs with no niche to join 9rules. But anyway, you won’t know whether you’re going to be accepted if you don’t try, right? Mark this date in your calendar.
- May 7, 2008
- August 6, 2008
- November 5, 2008
If you’re seriously considering to join 9ules, read and understand the basic principal behind it and make sure that you have the quality as well as originality. I myself has set my own sight to be in 9rules on a later stage, but still I’m gonna submit my application on the next round. But before that, help me fix the bug from the installation of WordPress 2.5.1;)
Other related news?
Jonathan Snook left 9 rules for his own reason a year ago. Found out why
Little bit about statistics
My favorite part, it’s not a complete post without statistics right?
Chawlk is relatively a new website rolled out last January. It does not have as much visitors that 9rules is having at the moment. But Chawlk is showing a little sign of improvement (though no spike), while 9rules is going the other way round.
p/s; this is not a sponsored review or persuasive post to include blogjer in or whatsoever intention
On this page and on wikipedia have mentioned about Ali, Ali2 which are stated as the codenames for 9rules’s version. But it doesn’t mention what Ali and Ali2 is or where they are now. And then there is my.9r which is ‘friend and point area‘. Again there is no complete desription about it. And finally there is Chawlk, which I finally can see how it does look like. From this post, Chawlk is the new my.9r , which incorporates all functionality from there and relaunching it in a new website. So what’s left on 9rules??
