In May 2006, I applied for membership to the fairly-exclusive blog network 9rules and I was fortunate to be accepted.

9rules has changed a lot since I became a member; I’ve lived through three designs/versions (the ‘original’, Ali and the new Ali2).

The ‘pre-Ali’ 9rules was the first version I experienced and it lacked many of the community features for non-members such as notes. We members had our own forum with thousands and thousands of threads. Besides the forum, it was mainly an RSS aggregator but it had some community features such as community blogs. At this time, communities used to have their own blogs highlighting good entries from the various blogs which constituted that community which were written by community leaders (the Web++ leaders were myself and Brian Benzinger).

In July 2006, they added notes to 9rules. Notes provided a way for non-members to directly contribute to 9rules because notes were basically a mixture between a clipping, forum thread and comment thread which anyone could post to. Opening registration to non-members (who remain non-members of 9rules but member of 9rules’ notes) upset many members as they believed 9rules lost some of its exclusivity but in hindsight it was a good move because it filled 9rules with fresh, public content and an even livelier community. As the popularity of notes grew, members found themselves unable to actively contribute to our clubhouse (private member forum) and notes so many chose one to contribute to most.

In October 2006 even more members were welcomed to 9rules which was also controversial but many of our best members are from those batch .

2007 has seen the introduction of 9rules Ali, which added social networking and 9rules points, and then Ali2, which was a much more refined version of the original Ali with a few extra features (such as Clips which could best be described as a Digg clone :P) and a better design chucked in. Ali2 also saw the closure of our clubhouse and a change in the network’s rules which requires members to be active on Notes… both moves probably trying to bridge the gap between members and readers/semi-members/notes members.

9rules will face challenges in the future regarding what membership actually means but hopefully they’ll overcome them.

Tags: 9rules