Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Back in the 1990’s, when the Web just got popular, it seemed like every more or less large web site had to have a bunch of awards.   Awards were the first web promotion tricks that I’ve learned of.  Anyone could establish his own award.  All you needed was a little image that looked like a medal or a star.

Awards were demanded by the “big guys” who wanted to show how “special” they were.  And they were often taken advantage of by really small guys, who were making the awards, and used them to promote their own “award giving” web sites.

Then there were so many web awards that nobody cared about them anymore.  And it was quite for some time.

The new wave started with trust certifications.  Lots and lots of people on the web were followed by all sorts of scammers, spammers, crackers, hackers, and what not.  Many got worried and afraid.  So, the certification boom started.  Trust of that, protection of this, guarantee of something, warranty of something else, etc.

Surprisingly, after all these years, so many web sites still use this non-sense.  What is even more surprsing is that so many of them are prepared to pay money (and huge money in some cases) to get the award or certification.   Why?  That’s really beyond me.

Chiefy for the www.f0bia.org !!!

I’m browsing through hundreds of web sites every day, and it’s been a while since I saw something that struck me as original. f0bia did it for me. With dark background, blinking cursor, and keyboard navigation it closely resembles UNIX command line. Yet it’s not just a show off, but a real blog with posts, search, RSS feeds, links, pictures, etc.

Well done!

Update: for those of you interested in technical details, the blog seems to be running WordPress and WordPress CLI theme.

It’s nice to see that pop music is not the only one getting top charts, awards, and noisy promotions:

The world’s biggest classical music radio station and the world’s most influential classical music magazine have joined forces to make an already great classical music award even better 

Particularly, I’m glad to see that people can vote via a web site.

Some of my friends are voting for the conductor Valery Gergiev. If you are not familiar with his work, you can listen to some of it here.

Usually, I am not that interested in watching The Oscar. Usually they are pretty boring. And usually I don’t agree with both nominations and awards.

But this time I had two reasons to watch the show.

The first one was Jon Stewart of The Daily Show fame. He is hilarious. This is the only TV show that I have watched almost religiously in my life. I missed him already, because he didn’t appear on the show for the few days (probably because of his preparations for the Oscar ceremony). I needed my humor fix.

The second reason was “Crash“. I was very surprised to see it nominated. If you don’t remember, I reviewed it earlier last year. It was one of the best movies I’ve seen ever. And it was one of the most underpromoted movies too.

In case “Crash” would have won any awards I could read about it the next day, so I didn’t have to see the show for that. What I wanted to see the show for was the reaction of the audience if wouldn’t have won anything.

I’m glad to report that I both enjoyed watching the ceremony (Jon Stewart was as good as I expected him to be, or even better) and “Crash” won a few Oscars, including the “main” one - The best motion picture of the year.

My faith in Oscar awards and ceremony shows might just get a little stronger…