History
Award
More than ten years ago was the beginning of webawards and the idea began to spread.
When and where the first web award was confered will probably be a secret for everey time. At the latest in
the years 1997/98 the phenomenon webaward was noticed by the internet-public.
If talking about webawards here, it means a commendation given by one ore more individuals to honor outstanding websites. It is not talked about the professional contests and awards created by organizations or companies. The idea behind is of course the same: to choose, to notice and to introduce an outstanding work. An award is a tribute and approval for specific performances.
Webmasters embraced this activity. They created award graphics to
deliver their message and to symbolize their appreciation. These awards are mostly accompanied
by a comment, why the award is given, and/or a laudation for the recipient.
The motive of a honest praise implicates that it is given without consideration.
With the quickly increasing number of webawards the original motive sometimes became blurred or was consciously ignored. There were and there are awards distributed randomly without consideration of the quality of the awarded website. In some cases awards were abused as promotion for the Awardmaster´s website or for commercial reasons. Only the back link counts, the character of a distinction disappeares and the award besomes absurd.
As a nearly consequence already in the beginnig in 1998 webmasters
thought about how to separate the wheat from the chaff. A community concerning webawards developed,
rules and criteria were generated, discussions, sometimes keen, sometimes needless, were resumed.
This was with the object to keep alive and to advance the original idea of webawards and it´s
ideal worth. It succeeded more or less.
So the webaward overlived more than ten years. The previous apex of the hobby web award happend around the millennium. Afterwards many awards disapeared and other projects closed, the offspring was rather marginal. During the last years qualitative and quantitative changes could be recognized, also a clearly less interest and reduction of the community [annotation: in Germany].
But the webaward is still alive. Loved and hated, idolized and derided, coveted and disdained, inflated and ignored... Far from rules, sciences and controversy the award could still be what it was intended for: a gorgeous detail of culture between webmasters, that hopefully will not vanish into thin air.
Awardindices
whether volitional or not, awardindices are of importance with reference to the history of
webawards. Indices accept members following basic principles. They pay attention to their members
not to dump their awards or to misuse the webaward.
In the course of time the quality of webawards was evaluated usind different perspectives
and in each case awardprograms estemmed to be valuable aquired membership of the
divers indices.
Many of these projects with different emphases emerged and passed by, even today
quit a few indices exist.
Further projects concerning awards were published, form information platforms and
boards to campaigns to carry special ideas or values.
The idea was to introduce many of these indices and
projects from Germany on the following pages, like the former German award-history did some
years ago.
This couldn't be realized by me. Many of the owners of these projects are no more
present in the internet or lost the interest in webawards. Therefore it is not possible to
compile material and sanctions to publish it in the used volume.
So I limit the exhibition to a small chronological overview of German award projekts.
Without reaching completeness, some of them are shown to keep them in mind for the
following generations of awardmasters.
The focus rather lies on the award museum.
Some pointers:
Only older, meanwhile closed projects from the german-speaking countries are mentioned.
The exhibition is only conduced to inform and not to give any rating or recommendation.
The projects and indices are sorted by year. Additional to the short descriptions sometimes
graphics are available, please follow the links "screenshot".
I´m sorry, so far descriptions are only in German.
Some of the introduced websites are still online, even if they are no more updated. These are
linked here to be visited for further impressions.
From many projects no material and graphics are available for me. If somebody can help,
I will be pleased.
Indices and other projects which are online and active to date can be found on the links page. A broad impression will be achieved by visiting the sites.