In Defence of Reciprocity

by Ken & Maureen Lussey, Webmasters
The Médaille d'Or for Web Site Excellence (site closed)
15 November 1999

Print Version

We've read Don's growing collection of articles with great interest, and identify very closely with most of what their authors have said.

But there's one important area in which our approach differs from others' view of best practice. And in the best traditions of furthering debate, we'd like to use this article to focus in on that area, and ask just one question. Are there valid reasons for insisting that a site displays your award before you give it a permanent place in your award scheme?

Let's get to the argument…

For some, the idea of including in your scheme only those sites prepared to display your award, and link to you, is dubious practice. That's a fair argument. And when applied to an award scheme that selects successful sites ONLY on the basis of whether they will display the award, it's a very fair argument. Schemes like that blur the ground between awards and link exchanges to the point where it's hard to tell one from another.

So let's tie down that question a bit more closely, before trying to come up with some persuasive arguments in support of the answer "yes."

Let's assume an award scheme with a clearly stated set of relatively objective criteria, and a review process that leads to an average success rate of around 10%. Can there be valid reasons for a scheme like that normally insisting on display?

At last, some reasons…

We've come up with three main reasons for taking the line we do, with the last two being variants on the same theme. The first is by far the most important, and was what initially led us to the approach we adopted when the Médaille d'Or was launched.

1. Cross-validation

The toughest part of getting any award scheme off the ground has to be those few first faltering steps. How do you build up the critical mass of the scheme to the point at which it becomes self-sustaining? How do you give it the credibility and desirability needed?

That could be the subject of another article entirely. For current purposes, it's enough to say that there was a very obvious route to critical mass — of a sort — that seemed to us to undermine the principles on which we wanted to operate the Médaille d'Or. It would have been very easy to give the Médaille d'Or's home site a lot of initial credibility by simply going out and looking for sites we liked, reviewing them, and then letting them in on the good news they had received an award they'd never heard of.

For us, that would have negated what we were trying to achieve. For us, the true measure of the credibility of the Médaille d'Or lies in the quality of the sites that consider the scheme significant enough to want to display the award and link to it.

That's an approach that made achieving an initial critical mass very much more difficult. But it's an approach that keeps us honest, and an approach that stops us getting complacent.

So that's reason number one. Only including excellent sites that display the award and link back to the Médaille d'Or drives up the quality of what we do; and provides an external assurance of the continuing credibility of the scheme.

2. No time-wasters, please

Reading others' contributions here reveals that we all suffer from the "now I'll send my lousy new site to a thousand search engines and five hundred award schemes" syndrome. And from the closely related "I'm a cynical marketing executive who gets paid by the number of inward links I achieve for my client's site, so forget the ethos of the Internet" syndrome. There's a final, especially problematical group: those who take the trouble to let you know that "recent surfing has uncovered these ten wonderful sites you really should offer your award to."

There's no objective way to test this, but we believe that we have cut down the number of time wasters, however well meaning, who consume resource we'd prefer to deploy on genuine applicants. We do this by normally only accepting nominations made via the form on the Médaille d'Or site. That form contains a question asking nominators to confirm that if the nomination is successful, the Médaille d'Or Award graphic will be displayed on the site.

Nominations not answering that question in the affirmative, or not answering it at all (and some don't), simply do not get reviewed.

This approach is not watertight. We still find that as many as 25% of successful nominations who are reviewed and placed on our "Recent Successes" list never display the award and end up falling out of the scheme rather than finding a permanent home on one of our subject lists.

But we do believe it helps. So that's reason number two: to deter some time wasters.

3. The ethos of the Internet

Reason number three can be seen as a more positive spin on reason number two. There's a chunk of the Internet out there that values the contribution Award Schemes can make to the WWW. There's another chunk that does not.

That's fine. But we want to ensure that we focus our efforts on the first of these chunks and reduce our interaction with those whose only use of award schemes is as a means of publicity. Being very up-front about the requirement to display and cross-link helps achieve this.

It's interesting to note that the question on our submission form referred to above often produces answers along the lines of: "of course, or why would I bother to apply." Now that's a really good question, and one whose answer we wish we understood.

Reason number three, therefore, is all about ensuring our award scheme caters mostly for people who share our approach to the WWW and our view of what an award scheme is for.

Conclusions

It's interesting to try to work out where all this is taking us. Maybe one conclusion is that there are in practice some distinct variations on the idea of what an award scheme IS actually for.

One perfectly valid approach is to set up a scheme that seeks to catalogue the very best sites that exist on the WWW. That is clearly the aim of a number of colleagues whose articles have appeared on this site. However, our analysis suggests to us that the Médaille d'Or is in practice something slightly different.

What we effectively offer is a stamp of quality assurance available to those whose sites meet the criteria and who wish to display such a stamp. The credibility of the scheme is based on and enhanced by the overall quality of the sites reviewed on the Médaille d'Or home site, as well as by the individual quality of the sites displaying the award.

We are very explicitly not seeking to catalogue the very best that exists on the WWW: instead focusing on the very best of those who wish to become involved in a quality assurance scheme of this sort.

And, finally...

It's confession time. Setting yourselves up as experts on any subject is always dangerous; though probably not as dangerous as taking stances on issues of high principle. It's too easy to have your balloon punctured by someone able to show you've not always lived exactly by those principles.

So we'd have to say upfront that we have from time to time experimented with offering the Médaille d'Or to sites we particularly liked: and this was obviously the only way to go when the scheme was in its infancy. But that approach is pretty much incompatible with a wish to include only sites wanting to display the award: we very quickly began to ask ourselves who was wasting whose time.

We'd also have to be upfront and acknowledge that from time to time sites whose webmasters have successfully applied for the Médaille d'Or but not subsequently displayed the award still find their way onto our permanent subject lists. But they do have to be pretty gob-smackingly brilliant.

The bottom line is that rules are there to be interpreted, especially if they're our own rules: but ONLY when doing so doesn't call into question the underlying principles on which we've tried to build the Médaille d'Or.