On 21 Dec 2006, an email from 9Rules came in, informing me that Gems Sty is now part of the 9Rules web community. For those of you who might not have heard of it before:
9rules is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof.
Well and wow then! I’m not quite sure if this is “the very best” stuff online just yet – but it’s pretty cool to have it recognized by a community where its editors do actually go through some sort of curation – selecting and sifting among blog submissions – traditionally about 8-15% of the submissions are accepted.
And it is this very thing about human selection that draws me too – many blog aggregation sites are either incarnations of the “Blogring” concept – whereby a central place links to any website that was submitted, or the “Digg” mode, where popular posts are voted and moved to a prominent front page.
“Blogring” style aggregators can quickly get boring as quality and appeal varies – how many of you really do click on the “Next Blog” button on top of Blogger pages? The “Digg” style requires popular topics with wide audiences, sometimes those that appeals to the common denominators of a broad audience. Human-intervened selection process, on the other hand, has the gift of judgement, and it can pick up stuff that may have been left behind because of its quirkiness, niche content, etc. And that’s where 9Rules come in – picking the best content on the web, regardless of a blog’s popularity or links.
So there! Another little milestone for Gems Sty!
