Articles

The history of Web awards can be said to have begun when Tim Berners-Lee at CERN made available his program, "WorldWideWeb," to the Internet at large on May 17, 1991. This announcement set the stage for many wonderful, future developments to occur around the world, including Web awards.

In the beginning, Web pages were hand coded using Tim's HyperText Markup Language (HTML). They were drab-looking documents with black text on a battleship-gray background. The only color came from the hypertext links which were blue or, if they were "visited," purple. HTML's page layout capabilities were bare minimum, and any referenced image was often left wherever the author could get it to display adequately.

However, aesthetics really didn't matter to those publishing in Tim's WWW Area then. Practically all of the authors were academics who were more concerned with their content than looks. After all, their works were being read by their peers online and that meant their reputations were online as well. Content was "king" and by the end of 1992, the World Wide Web's development was well underway by these Internet users now called "Webheads."

At this time, HyperText and HyperMedia (terms coined by Ted Nelson) were concepts, not products, and Web-page designs and layouts didn't vary to any significant degree. The "look and feel" of Web pages seemed to be stuck in gray clay and they needed a hard shove to get them out of this rut.

That hard shove came explosively during the Summer of 1993 from the University of Illinois at Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Mark Andreesen's Mosaic Team Project released a Web-browsing program that could create and display Web pages in an exciting new way. Mosaic quickly inspired many a Gestalt-oriented Webhead to leave forever indexed gray pages for intra-navigable Web sites filled with imagery and color.

Content was still "king," but there was now a "joker" called Creativity. Diehard Webheads started pushing the envelope as far as they could using Mosaic. Practically every "cutting-edge site" had a "Download NCSA Mosaic" button on its home page and excitement soon ran rampant throughout the Web.

Then, in April 1994, David Filo and Jerry Yang opened Yahoo!, the first popular Web directory. So popular was it, their listings of Web titles grew almost exponentially, creating a need to distinguish which select few of the many offerings were the "best of topic."

Since Yahoo! was a Web directory, it was edited by humans. So it was relatively easy for the editors to recognize the "best of topic." They showed their picks by tacking on their "cool shades," a sunglasses image, to the end of the selected listing(s). Not only did they denote which were the best resources for the topics, they put them at the top of the listings!

This small, simple icon had at least three effects on the Web Community. First, it created great pride and public recognition for the authors who were "cooled." Second, it made others want to be "cooled" by a Yahoo! editor. And finally, it gave others ideas of their own on how to recognize "quality" on the Web (while thinking about how an awards program could also increase their sites' popularity and personal self-worth).

In the Spring of 1994, Brandon Plewe of the State University of New York at Buffalo launched his Best of the Web Awards program. Winners were chosen by users and thus featured those sites that visitors found to be the best. His aim was:

Brandon's first group of winners was announced at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web in Geneva, Switzerland, on May 26, 1994. Marc Andreessen, Eric Bina, Rob Hartill, Kevin Hughes and Lou Montulli were also inducted into a Hall of Fame and presented Chromachron watches engraved with the WWW logo on the back.

That first year, Brandon observed some interesting phenomena.

In retrospect, Brandon's off-handed remark, "I won't be doing it alone," was prophetic, if not profound. Other pioneers of "badge sites" like Glenn Davis (Cool Site of the Day & Project Cool) and David Siegal (High Five) appeared on the scene. The rest of 1994 saw award programs open on the Web like some new fad.

Whereas before, some Webheads had worked hard to "wow" their peers with "killer pages," they now started killing themselves trying to create the best Web sites they could so they and their sites would be ordained as "hot" or "cool" by these new award programs.

They also split into three groups. The first group were linear thinkers and focused on assembling the be-all-end-all "hot" content on a given subject. The second group were Gestalt-oriented and sought to create "cool" sites with the coolest looking graphics. The last group were the few who took a bicameral approach and pursued "supreme Web excellence."