Our first blogger interview is with the newest member of the 9rules network, Paul Stamatiou.

Tell us briefly about yourself

I am a 19 year old student at the Georgia Institute of Technology studying under a Computational Media major. Houston, Texas is my home and Greece is my second home. I’m all Greek, so I speak the language and visit relatives in Greece often. I have been very enthusiastic about computers since a young age. I am particularly interested in the hardware that makes a computer run and have attained CompTIA A+ Hardware certification a few years back just for fun.

What motivated you to start blogging?

Blogging started as curiosity more than anything. I had been playing around with serving files on a linux computer and decided to download WordPress one day just to give it a try. Looks like it stuck. I didn’t really get into it until recently when I had written a how-to article about setting up the Azureus bittorrent client for a friend. Somehow that article ended up on the frontpage of Lifehacker.com and ever since then I’ve been devoted to writing great, helpful articles.

There are many blog networks out there today – what in particular attracted you to 9rules?

9rules is by far the only blog network that has such a great community of passionate members. Browsing through the directory of other members’ websites, you can easily see how energetic they are about blogging. They want to spread their knowledge with others. Taking a glance at other blog networks, I saw that bloggers were more motivated to blog for money or just to meet their daily goal of 3 posts a day. In contrast 9rules is all about quality content, as their slogan says, “Quality loves company.”

What do you think of their business model? Or is there one?

I’m not too aware of a 9rules business model other than finding the best content in the web and grouping them together. I think it’s a fantastic model. The whole principle behind a blog network is to group similar blogs together; in the case the similarity being excellent content. 9rules really pays attention to this guiding priciple. It would not have been this successful if the business model was shoddy.

What do you do when you’re not blogging?

When I’m not blogging, I’m either in class, socializing with friends, or driving around Atlanta. I’m a huge car nut and know everything about exotic cars. I drive a fairly tweaked V8 Mustang and couldn’t be happier… except for that time I got to ride in some fast cars at Road Atlanta Track Day.

Your computer & OS of choice? Why?

My primary computer right now is a Mac Mini running OS X Tiger.It’s overclocked, has 1GB of DDR400, an 8x DVDRW Pioneer SuperDrive, and a 300GB hard drive. I have been a proponent of PC’s in the past but after working on Macs on my high school yearbook staff, a switch was imminent. The interface is unparalleled. I also modded my mini quite a bit. However, I keep a Shuttle XPC around for playing those latest games.

Websites you visit each day?

9rules (of course), my Mint stats, Gmail, my RoundCube webmail, Digg, BinaryBonsai, Flickr Group for Binary Bonsai, del.icio.us, 123macmini.com forums, Anandtech, TomsHardware, Avalonstar.com, SFFTech.com forums, Facebook, Performancing, Lifehacker, HaveAMint.com forums, Google News and few school-related websites.

What advice would you give someone who is new to blogging and looking to increase their traffic?

Quality content is everything. Once you have your content down you can worry about site design. I highly recommend checking out my article on how to boost your blog traffic.

Our thanks to Paul for taking the time for this interview!

Interested in doing an interview with us? Drop us a line at interviews [at] blogmedia [dot] biz

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