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Why These Baubles?


It would have started on March 20th 2001, but then www.rongorongo.org was unattended, its webmaster struggling with a very nasty software accident. Much, much later, when things were repaired, there, in webmaster@rongorongo.org, was this unsolicited piece of mail, dated 2001/03/20, drowning in megabytes of spam, one virus, and one trojan:
Congratulations! Your site has been chosen by bigchalk.com to be featured in our directory of exceptional educational sites on the Web. Out of more than 110,000 sites reviewed, we found yours to be in the top 2%" based on your rich content and its academic relevance.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. If the Trojans had looked their gift horse in the mouth, Troy might still be standing. But there were more urgent things to do than look into the mouth of this gift horse, and so it was left standing there, outside the walls.

The matter was investigated when leisure allowed; Big Chalk indeed appeared to be a genuinely educational site. No Achaeans hiding in this horse's flanks, it seemed. Somewhere else on the web, a nice-looking award with a trophy in front of a spiderweb caught the eye, leading to the International Assocation of Webmasters and Designers, a professional-sounding outfit. Why not apply and see? And it was awarded. Suddenly, it all seemed too easy. This led to finding out about website awards.

To quote Rainer Klein, Webmaster, of Webmaster Central Awards:

Website awards serve two different purposes.
Firstly, they are a great way to promote a website. Winners receive a link on an award giver's website that will directly improve the amount of traffic through free advertising.
They also increase the ranking in search engines through a mechanism called "link popularity." This will also result in an increase of visitors to the site.

To repeat the raison d'être of rongorongo.org:

A great deal of nonsense has been written about the hieroglyphs of Easter Island, even, in fact mostly, in supposedly serious publications, from Carroll's tales in the Journal of the Polynesian Society one hundred years ago to Bahn's juvenile fantasies in New Scientist recently. But who would know that the illustrations of the Santiago Staff published by New Scientist are an artist's fantasy without the slightest resemblance to the real thing? That the vignettes at the top of pp.92-108 of The Atlas of Languages are modern fabrications? (there is a tablet reproduced there p.100, but half of it is out of focus).  So, www.rongorongo.org was created to fight ignorance and fantasy peddlers with education.

To be effective, rongorongo.org must be visited. If website awards help, forget the bauble aspect, remember the benefits. The trap, however, lay in applying for give-away and low-level awards. So, another long, time-consuming search was in order.

It eventually unearthed Award Sites! Go for broke, apply for a few high-level ones, those with the most emphasis on contents, of course, and whose criteria do not specify that external links must open in a new window: rongorongo.org does not qualify. But why this strange rule? Just a little thought provided the answer: so that you can always get back to the page which sent you there; true: never trust the "Back" button. Ah! something learnt. Useful. Makes sense. Better stick with that in the future.

So it was quite a surprise to find the Shadow Poetry Dragonfly Award in Anon's mailbox, almost by return mail, too. Not Gold, not Silver, not Bronze, just Merit, which made it all the more genuine-sounding, the only eye-candy at rongorongo.org being the Gallery of statues and sites, and even that was added as an afterthought, as a necessary evil in a bid to gain more visitors. The rest is forbiddingly bare and stark, and yes, it could do with a coat of paint and the odd flower or kazarimono.

So, time to collect some awards, perhaps. There are some tangible benefits there:

  • Some increased publicity
  • Lessons to be learnt
  • The implicit criticism of lesser awards (i.e. Merit, Bronze), prodding towards better design, leisure allowing.

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