Awards

This page collected the badges. If you were not blogging in 2009 that sentence will mean nothing to you, so it is worth explaining what they were.

The badges

A blog award, in this era, was not given by anybody official. It was a small graphic — usually amateurish, usually a bit garish — that one blogger passed to another, along with a rule saying the recipient had to pass it on to five or seven or ten more, and often had to write something in the process. Seven true things about yourself. Ten blogs you read. One thing you have never told anyone.

The ones that landed here included the Proximity Award, the Dragon Award, “Your Blog Is Fabulous”, Honest Scrap and the 2009 Friendly Blogger award. They lived on this page as a wall of images, which is why almost none of the original text of it survives — there barely was any. The page was the badges.

What they were actually for

Described plainly, a blog award was a chain letter. Described accurately, it was a discovery mechanism, and it was rather a good one.

Consider what one actually did. Somebody who read you decided, publicly, that you were worth reading. To accept it you had to name several other blogs, which meant your readers were handed a list of places they had probably never seen, vouched for by someone whose taste they already trusted. Those blogs then did the same. There was no algorithm anywhere in the loop, no advertising, and no possibility of buying your way in — the only currency was somebody being willing to put their own name on the recommendation.

The tasks attached to them mattered too. Honest Scrap asked for ten true things you had not said before, and people took it seriously. A surprising amount of what was actually revealing on personal blogs in that period was written in response to a garish little graphic with a rule attached.

Why the names aren’t listed

An award post traditionally named who gave it to you and who you were passing it to, which means the original page and its associated posts are a list of private individuals. None of those names are restored here, for the same reason the commenter leaderboard is not — see the readers page for the full explanation.

The badges themselves are not reproduced either. They were made by other people, and a fifteen-year-old amateur graphic is still somebody’s work. This blog’s own position on reuse is set out on its licence page, and it would be a poor look to hold that view about your own photographs while republishing everybody else’s artwork.

What replaced them

Nothing, really. The follower count replaced them, and then the algorithm replaced the follower count, and neither of those requires anybody to vouch for anybody. If you want to see what the sociologists made of the period, the long-running usability research published by the Nielsen Norman Group tracked how people actually read and moved around the web across exactly this transition, and reading its work from either side of 2010 makes the change look considerably less like a fashion and more like a shift in how attention was being routed.

The other things that lived in the sidebar

The awards page was one item in a column that was, by any modern standard, absurdly busy. A 2010 personal blog sidebar was closer to a noticeboard than to navigation, and this one carried, at various points: a tabbed widget cycling through popular posts, recent posts, recent comments and a tag cloud; the full category list, running to around sixty entries; the commenter leaderboard; a visitor map showing dots for everywhere anyone had ever loaded the page from; a spam counter proudly displaying how many comments had been blocked; badges for the memes the blog played; badges for the memes it hosted; a photo-sharing widget; a blog badge for other people to copy onto their own sidebars; and a calendar of the current month with the posting days highlighted.

Almost none of that has any function. It was decoration, and more precisely it was affiliation — every badge said which corners of the web this blog belonged to, and a reader who recognised three of them knew immediately whether they were among their own people. The awards were simply the most explicit version of the same signal.

Sidebars like that vanished for good reasons: they were slow, they broke on phones, and the widgets they depended on were shut down one by one by the companies that ran them. But something did go with them. A modern site tells you what it is. A 2010 sidebar told you who it knew.

Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou