A few of the folks I “hang with” online are/were involved in the 9rules network. I am not a member, but I had tried to become one at one point. I’ve been following the recent actions of the network with some interest, and thought I would save my thoughts for later as they may be relevant for other communities in which I am involved and have influence. Some background on the current issue is probably in order.
Essentially, many people had joined the network for the purpose of being affiliated with other bloggers who created great content. Their goal was to enrich the web. These folks chose to participate in the network insofar as they posted new, quality content to their own blogs, which were syndicated specifically to the rest of the members. Although the network powers-that-be had created a site for interaction among members, these folks never saw participation in those forums as a requirement to their membership, simply their continued contribution of quality blog content.
Recently, the terms of membership changed so that you must participate in the forums to remain a member. The people who thought that their blogging contribution was enough realized (with different levels of reaction) that they would no longer qualify for membership and asked to withdraw. This accounts for more than half of the people who I relate with who are/were also 9rules members. What’s bothersome to me, especially had I been a member, is the process surrounding the change of the terms of service.
It seems as though the people deciding that forum participation should be a requirement were the people who were already active on the forums. Members who did not see a value in the forums or did not see participation there as a requirement for membership understandably did not visit the forums to participate in the decision. Rather than send email to members asking if the change would be agreeable to the membership, the decision was made and notices of the change sent.
It is interesting that so many people had a different impression of what 9rules was all about and have left. Not only is that interesting, but also the reaction that the 9rules maintainers have had to the poor response to their actions. Take for example Christian’s experience.
The responses in the comments there from Tyme and Scrivs, two 9rules maintainers, seem openly hostile. You can find examples of similar reactions from them on many of the sites who have decided to leave the network. It’s natural that they would be upset that people would leave, but to react in such a way is very strange when trying to foster a community.
Moreover, wishing that the communication had happened privately when you operate a blog network is an outright pipe dream. Listen to yourself speak the words: “Private” and “Blog”. Nuh-uh.
What might have been a better reaction to the growth of their community? A better effort to shape the direction of the community than alienating their long-standing members. The solution is simple.
When communities get large, they naturally segregate. By separating the forum participants from the non-participants, but allowing the groups to continue, both groups could thrive within the community. Instead, the two groups were created, and one of them was told to shove off. If one of the main purposes of the network is to help each other and be a community, this is a very strange way to accomplish that.
I suppose it’s easy to stand somewhere outside all of this and preach, not having built my own blog network or managed their large membership. I am interested in all of these going on because practically all of the bloggers I know in real life were members of 9rules, and it’s all I hear these days. Plus, being a leader in a (non-blogging) community of my own, I am interested in the metamorphosis of this network that was once well-respected by the people on the web that I myself respect.
Were I to create my own blog network (and I have no delusions that I have time for such a thing), it wouldn’t be about creating content for the network site. It would be about connecting users better.
The web is too diverse to drop every blog into a single, strict category. It’s also difficult to find the “key site” that pulls together the blogs dealing with a single topic.
For example, I hang around with a lot of Philly bloggers in real life. I write about hanging out with them. I write about my own experiences in Philly. While my site does have content about Philadelphia, you’ll note that it’s not primarily a blog about Philadelphia. Pigeonholing my site into a single “Philadelphia” category seems narrow-minded.
If I was looking for a list of bloggers from Philadelphia to see if they had similar experiences to mine, or simply to read about what’s going on in my area, where would I go? There are a few sites I know of as starting places for sure, but there isn’t a place that connects all of them together well. Even the ones I know of that connect them to some degree are all content-generating, meaning that sure, you have a blog of your own, but membership is based on your contribution to the aggregating site.
A better blog network would unite people with common interests. It would pool sites together like Technorati does under specific but varied tags, and give bloggers more control over which channels their own blog (and blogs they read) belonged to. You would be allowed to categorize content from your own site or others’, create events and topics for discussion among the blogs that fit your reading criteria, and participate solely from your own blog: Content is for your site, indexing, relation, and membership is provided by the network as its sole features.
One of the things I really think would be neat is a way to forward discussion topics to people who have expertise or interest in what you want to read about. You could forward food topics to groups of foodie blogs, or tech questions to techie blogs via the network, and then watch the network for blogs that respond to your topic. Blogs that write about a chosen topic could see what other blogs in the network have also said about that topic, and contribute to the conversation on those blogs. The network site could map that interaction as output that outsiders could follow. It could be very cooperative, yet wouldn’t require participation in a forum.
Well, it’s something to think about for later when building up the Habari community, to make sure that if we refocus what the community is all about (which I hardly expect us to do, but you never know) then we need to make sure that we don’t let go many of our long-standing respected members for lack of informing them of the changes and asking for their involvement.
Plus, if someone cooks up a network such as I’ve described, be sure to invite me.
