The ongoing legacy of 9rules

It always strikes me how the most active people from the old 9rules community – and I’m thinking about the community from 2005-2007, when I was a new member and the Triad was still around and everything felt awesome – have all ended up skewing toward what I like to think of as the New Creative Industries: web development and strategy, digital design, digital photography, etc. This from a group that wasn’t necessarily a tech- or web-related bunch: people in 9rules did not blog exclusively about technology, development or digital design at all.

For those who don’t remember, 9rules was a blog community. A pretty great one, for a while. Backed by Scrivs and Tyme and Mike, 9rules collected the best of unrepresented blogs, aggregating content and helping others discover good writing and design. It was an honor to be selected.

I was a late bloomer – I came in on round 5 of acceptances in 2006, a few years before the Triad sold off and the site became a shell – but I remember the thrill in finding like-minded blog nuts, all blogging about random things.

Many of these people I still keep track of. I still follow Kyle Neath and Alex Morse and Scrivs, and I’d consider myself Internet Friends with even more – Nils Geylan and Abi Jones come to mind. Even Deane is a former 9rules alumnus.

There are more. More talented former 9rules bloggers. More still awesome people. I can’t list them all.

And, outside of the 9rules connection, they all have one thing in common: They all work on the web. Or, they are keenly interested in the web. Or they use the web to their advantage.

By collecting high quality blogs, was 9rules also – in some way – collecting a new generation of curators and web creatives and future people of note? Was I lucky enough to be included in something larger than I even realize – larger than the site itself was even able to realize?

Was the underlying theme of 9rules this sense of discovery? That people who were willing to stay current and keep posting content and be vigilant about quality were already pre-determined to forge forward into the increasingly stable and viable web world?

Did we all become web professionals because we were in 9rules? Or did 9rules work because we were all deeply interested in creating great things for the web?

Or is just a blatantly obvious connection that I’ve been too dull to notice until recently?