9rules submissions, rounds, oh my….
Yesterday I wrote about the submission changes with 9rules. It’s simple really: send an email.
If you have a company that sells products you make money by those products being on the shelf, mark them up and sell them (in a nutshell). If the manufacturer can’t deliver the products, you can’t sell them because your shelves will be empty. When you start having distribution problems, do you continue to risk your business on companies that aren’t delivering up to par, or do you make other arrangements? The savvy make other arrangements.
When writers/bloggers request their content to be aggregated, they are providing a product – their blog. If I can’t access their blog, then it’s not being delivered. If accepted in 9rules, that delivery expectation continues. The short of it: uptime becomes important.
A good portion of the 9rules site revolves around people looking for content and the expectation for the reader is that the content will be there to retrieve when the user wants it (on their terms). Several large hosts have enough problems that it reflects against 9rules. Chunks of the 9rules site are inaccessible until these hosts get it together. Don’t get me wrong, all hosts have problems. Hell, Media Temple has their issues but the difference was individual sites had issues, not thousands all at once. During their grid issues perhaps one or two sites in 9rules were down at a time, not the entire Design Community (which is what happened the other day).
Round 5, like clockwork, there was a massive amount of issues for many people. They lost their site, changed URLs…it was a mess but it was a learning experience: rounds aren’t efficient when there are 1000s of submissions. Until people realize uptime/good hosting is important, going through 1000s of sites when a large percentage will be down makes no sense (these hosts are still having issues - we see it often in 9rules communities). My goal is to add quality sites to 9rules. We receive submissions daily so there isn’t the need to do rounds anymore. I’m going to be honest – there was another reason why rounds are not efficient anymore.
When Scrivs, Mike and I go through sites during rounds we can’t spend much time on the site. Just because a writer/blogger writes well doesn’t mean they are social. 9rules is very social now and for a member to gain maximum benefit from 9rules, the writer/blogger needs to be social. The internet is a social tool, a wonderful way to network. With my blog entry yesterday initially we’ll receive a ton but from then on, they will come in at a steady yet manageable pace. This gives me an opportunity to spend more time on a site and interact more with the blogger/writer. Just as in offline interactions sometimes a person doesn’t “shine” until you get to know them. Same with online – sometimes interaction brings out things that do not show on a blog. Knowing the hidden parts (if the blogger/writer is willing) we can work on getting those hidden gems to show so everyone can see them. 
So that’s it in a nutshell. As I often preach companies need to go back and revisit why they are doing the things they do. Is it still efficient and effective to do it that way and if not, how to improve? Many companies keep doing the same thing because that’s the way it was always done. Not the best business decision. Revisiting is good.
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