9rules Network

Back in April I mentioned that I was going to apply to join the 9rules network and my what a stooshie it caused:

If people want to sell their souls to advertising or to networks, why not write for the paper press? The 9rules thing seems 180 degrees opposed to everything I love about blogging and bloggers.

joining a ‘network’ seems a bit cliquey for me.

OK, maybe I’m overstating a little, it was little more than a ripple, and it was the bit about including adverts that really got people riled for, as diamond geezer recently found, the majority of “hobbyist” bloggers (within our little UK clique at least) don’t like the idea of blogs having adverts.

So let me clear some things up.

  1. I have not sold my soul to the devil
  2. I will not, ever, have adverts on this site
  3. Joining the 9rules network will have ZERO impact on you dear reader
  4. Point 3 isn’t entirely accurate as I hope the content will improve
  5. I have a very good reason for wanting to join, but more on that later this week

As it says on the 9rules website: “The 9rules Network is about building a community of high quality websites as well as a community of highly discerning readers. Content is king and looking good helps.”

I’m pretty excited about this and hopefully it’ll be the start of good things, things I’ve wanted to pursue for a while. The list of members is quite daunting, a lot were already respected regular reads of mine, even if I didn’t spot that they were members of the network. All in all I feel quite privileged that I was accepted, and I’m looking forward to learning new things and getting to know a whole new set of people.

I’ll post more about this later in the week, and I’ll include my reasons for joining. I’m sure a few of you will have guessed what I’ve been planning, so suffice to say that my main motivation for joining the 9rules network was focussed on THAT, not this site.