At the start of May, I was offered another "award". In fact, up to that point, I've been "offered" 7 awards for this personal page, and I've turned them all down. It's not something I do automatically. There are some award givers out there that I respect, like Out of Balance, the above mentioned Webbies, ProjectCool, and many more. In fact, both Comoflow and ProjectCool have recently recognized my pages and on both occasions, I was very flattered.

But it seems to me the vast majority of these "award" givers are people who can't design a site worth shit, and award a vast majority of their bestowments to women. It seems to me as if they are extremely lame attempts at an Internet pickup line. I'm not going to mention any sites I've turned down by name, especially since a few of my online friends have awards from these same sites, but I will discuss the details.

The first time I got e-mail from an award site, I wrote a thank you e-mail, and then I visited the guy's site. I should have visited it first before writing, because his site sucked big time, and when I read over his other "award winners", about 80% of them were women. I visited some of the sites, and other than a common trait of having a fairly attractive web host, most of these pages sucked too. I wrote the guy back quickly and told him sorry, but I wouldn't display his large and rather garish award on my site, but thanks for the good word. He promptly fired back an e-mail, wherein he called me an idiot, and he "rescinded" my award. I cried all night.

Within two days of winning that first award, I got 3 more notices in the mail of new awards, bestowed on me so graciously by these fine purveyors of the web. I visited all of their sites and noticed the same trend as the first one. Terrible design, about 100+K images and stuff on the home pages alone (major faux pas), and when reviewing the other award "winners" on each site, I noticed once again the trend of women being the major recipients of the awards. And between these three new "award givers" and the original one, I noticed a lot of the awarded sites were the same! I can only guess these guys read the first guy's site, and decided to bestow me with their trophies as well. I quickly e-mailed them all, thanking them for the recognition, but telling them I wouldn't display the award at my site. They rescinded my awards as well, and one of them was particularly harsh:

You think you are so cool, but you are an asshole. I've seen sites designed by 8 year old kids that blow your site away. I thought maybee (sic) you need the favor to boost you (sic) circulation but forget it asshole. You (sic) pages are (sic) lame when I first visited them and now I look them over even more, the lamness (sic) grows... And Ive (sic) got friends on the web. Ill (sic) make fucking sure you ever (shouldn't that be "never"?) get considered for an award again... Eat shit and die.

Kind of turned me off awards, which ended up being a good thing, because it was 6 months until I was awarded another "best of the internet" thingie. For a while I actually thought this idiot had some kind of pull with the rest of the awardies out there. Not that it bothered me, because sincerely it didn't. I was just surprised at the possibility that this kind of jerk had any pull on the Net.

Since that time, I've developed a theory about the majority of the small time awardies out there. I spent some time after the initial 4 episodes searching the Net, searching my friends' sites, for various awardies. I visited these pages, and one trend I've noticed amongst pretty much all the small time "bob's coolnet award" pages is that they are all guys. And they are all guys who can't design worth shit, can't write content, and above all else, can't even code properly. Their contrived web awards seem to be feeble attempts to increase the hit ratios on their pages, thus boosting their egos. It is also quite evident that the majority of their award winners are female, making believe in the pitiful "Internet pickup line" scenario.

When my 5th and 6th award came rolling in, I simply ignored the e-mail, and deleted the attached gifs without even looking at them. One of them was 32K in size! As soon as I saw the gif byte size, I stopped reading the e-mail, and I didn't even bother visiting the person's site. If they are stupid enough to try and get me to put a 32K gif on my pages as a link to their weak awardie page, well then, they are too stupid to even bother with! To this day, I don't even know if this person still lists me on their award page, and I don't even know the URL... nor do I really care.

And then number 7 came barreling into my mailbox a while ago, from yet another lame award site. It turns out a net friend recommended my page. I visited the awardie's site, and again, was inundated with weak graphics, weak design, and weak content, so I gave it a pass. But I got the real award I wanted. A net acquaintance thought my site was good enough to nominate me at an awards site, and that makes me feel a thousand times better than any award recognition. It means that someone I know likes and appreciates my site, and in the end, that's all I'm trying to do here.

When your friends and peers take the time to complement and recognize your work, it makes it all worthwhile. And no award can take the place of that.

I was a
ProjectCool
Sighting of the Day
on May 8th,
my brother's birthday!