Its been almost a week since the launch of 9rules Community. Been hell lot of busy this week, couldn’t get time to post something about it earlier. 9rules is growing at an amazing pace. And the 9rules Community could be the peacock feather on their hat. The Community currently has two main sections, Browse and Featured. All of the blogs are listed under various tags, and you can browse through the current posts of each blogs by browsing the tags. While Featured sections are the posts written by the 9rules members. The community no doubt will bring the readers and writers of the network more closer. More visibility for everyone, the bloggers will get their updated posts in the eyes of readers browsing the tabs, while readers now don`t have to search all blogs to find what they want to read, they can pick their tags.



Web 2.0, in my opinion is all about Social Networking. You need to make your social network more powerful to serve it better. Currently, most of the blog networks are just listing all blogs under their right-hand or left-hand bar. 9rules showcases the content of blogs to readers more effectively. Mike Rundel at Businesslogs has hinted about more features like user profiles, active caching of user sites, and advance search, all will lead to more powerful social network.



For a blog reader, who is interested in a particular topic or a blog, flagship of the blog or the blog network which owns the blog does not matter for much. An established Blog Network can only give a new blog an initial boost of traffic or give blogs its link value (which gets diminished day by day due to the ever-changing algorithm of Search Engines). A Blog Network doesn’t serve much purpose unless it’s able to nurture a strong feel of a community among all the network participants or until it highlights the individual blogs more effectively. Gawker Media has done extremely well by building a unique style (that is, its unique voice) which can be seen among all its blogs. Weblogsinc, being an early starter was able to rub off the link popularity of its highly successful blogs on other blogs, and hence was able to get the high Search Engine Traffic. With changing times, it’s very important to form a Blog Community rather than a Blog Network.



We launched the Instablogs Community on 1st January 2006. As of now, it is not open for the public. Ankit and his team are busy adding all the bells and whistles. I needn’t remind his team that we need to hasten things up.