A List Apart, Abduzeedo, Blog.SpoonGraphics, Boagworld, CSS-Tricks, HTML5 Doctor, Smashing Magazine, Soh Tanaka’s Blog, ThinkVitamin, Tuts+ Network. If you’re part of the Web Design and Development communities, these may sound familiar — they were the nominees in the “Blog of the Year” category of the 2010 edition of the .net Awards.

After seeing this list I immediately thought “Seriously? Is this the best of the Web? Is this the best our community can do?”. I beg to disagree.

What matters

Drawar. Frank Chimero. Bobulate. Subtraction. Design View. Ignore the Code. Where are they? Were they even close to being nominated?

These blogs talk about ideas, principles, process, failure, thinking, writing, crafting, doing, working, teaching, art, criticism, you and me, our community, all sorts of stuff that matter. None of the 25 must-know techniques you should be using.

They make me look at things in a different way and think about myself and what I do. They make me want to create. Make better stuff. Make stuff that matters, like they do. They make me smarter by osmosis while making mefeel like crap at the same time.

I believe that this is what matters. This is what should be celebrated. Why instead of How. I reckon I may learn the occasional trick from other types of blogs, and I don’t consider them expendable. But the .net Awards are celebrating the wrong kind of “best blogs”.

Taste and Democracy

Giving awards is fundamentally about recognizing excellence. Setting the best apart from the great. That requires a highly developed taste, that weird property defined as the ability to discern what is of good quality or of a high aesthetic standard.

Think about prestigious awards such as the Nobel Prize or the Academy Awards. They have one thing they have in common: they’re attributed by a selected group of individuals. Not everyone. When you consider everyone’s opinion, what you get is the average taste.

Now consider how the .net Awards work. Nominations and voting are open to everyone. The judges can only decide between the three most voted nominees¹ in each category. This promotes popularity, and in our not-so-mature community, popularity doesn’t imply quality. Even more if you ask everybody. Remember the part about average taste? Good.

The very nature of the web is at the root of this faulty process. Most people are used to a lot of democracy on the web. Comment. Vote. Like. Dislike. Rate. Until they encounter something that doesn’t let them express their opinion. Then they don’t care much about it at first — and that’s something the .net Awards team doesn’t want for sure.

This process makes people feel like they’re contributing to something and their opinion matters, and that’s why it’s so popular. People feel valuable, and everybody likes that. But it’s untrue and dishonest. We love the democracy of the web: it’s what makes it so great. But it’s interesting how suboptimal it is when striving for a premium quality curation.

It’s our fault

I blame ourselves as a community for letting this happen. We need to get better in every way. Create better things, so that there’s more out there for everyone. Consume better stuff. Learn from experience people. Teach what we know best. Push our limits. We have to rise the bar for our community — it still isn’t as mature as most people think, and the outcome of .net Awards is the public face of that immaturity.

However, the .net Awards are to blame as well. Those with a strong voice in our community need to speak and act carefully, because their actions influence a very large audience. I believe they’re influencing people in a wrong way by cheering upon what I consider the wrong principles to follow. This hurts our community.

The .net Awards aren’t paying enough respect to the amazing work of web professionals. What’s interesting is that they could really be celebrating the best of the web, but that task was handed down to us instead — we’re the ones not paying enough respect to ourselves.

If I’m sounding too severe with the .net Awards, let me make something clear: I’m very grateful for the .net magazine. It boasts worthy contributors and great content. It makes the web a better place. They’re one of great things we’re proud to have amongst us. Therefore, I’d expect the awards to share the same standard of quality. They don’t, but they could.

How to improve

By sticking to the ruling principles ruling the web too tightly, the .net Awards created a fragile and vulnerable process that celebrates popularity above all things and damages the awards’ credibility. Not only it isn’t the best of the web, it’s not even the best that .net magazine can do.

There may be a better alternative. This is my hypothesis:

Restricting the decision of the nominees and winners of any awards to an elite of professionals promotes the respect, honor and recognition of the awards themselves, its nominees and winners, as well as the overall enhancement of the surrounding community.

It’s an overwhelming endeavor and I’m aware of that. The amount of stuff that is happening on the web every second is tremendous. Maybe that has been the motivation behind the crowd-sourcing it so far. But I believe it can be done.

I’m also aware that the need to have some kind of open voting for promotion reasons may be inevitable. One way to get people interested and involved without compromising quality would be to have a “People’s Choice” category. It’s a reasonable compromise, and the folks of 10K Apart did it with great success.

Work it harder. Make it better.

Everyone wants a better web. Better websites. Better professionals. Better blogs. Better conferences. Better awards. I want that as well, and I believe it can be done. There should be no taboos, but the .net Awards and their credibility looks like a big one to me. I don’t get it. I believe we should openly discuss everything that we consider wrong with our own little community and how we can change it. That’s what it takes to make it better. This is all on our hands.

If you’re part of our community, please let me know to your opinions on this matter via email or Twitter. I would very much appreciate it.