Every December

Every December, AMY&PINK would do the awards. Man of the Year, Girl of the Year, Best Unique Design, and a few others. If you were blogging, you’d see the call. You could throw your name in if you wanted to. It felt ridiculous when I did it, but I did it anyway, because someone might notice what I’d made. That felt important.

There was something genuine about having a community that cared about blogs as blogs. Not as a platform for building something or cultivating a personal brand. Just places where you wrote about what you actually thought and cared about, the stuff that made you sound like yourself. Someone might design their sidebar obsessively, someone else might keep the layout minimal and let the writing carry everything. It all mattered because it was intentional, because the choice reflected something real.

The awards weren’t big—no money, no real prestige, just a list and maybe someone mentioning you on their site. But they meant someone out there was paying attention in a real way. That someone had clicked through and read enough to get what you were doing.

By 2009, the culture was already shifting. Twitter was eating everyone’s time. Blogging had started to feel like something people used to do. But there was still enough of the old guard around to make the awards feel real, like we were defending something that didn’t actually need defending because it defended itself just by existing.

I entered once. Don’t remember if I won. I remember thinking the whole thing was funny and earnest at the same time—which is the only way anything in that scene ever felt. No one was pretending it was important. We were all just saying: I made this thing. Does anyone care? Sometimes they did.