Third Place Is The Charm?
Picture this:
Germany and Portugal play in the semi-finals of the World Cup 2006. Germany wins 3rd place, collects their bronze medal. Italy and France play in the final. Italy wins, France is 2nd, but neither receives the FIFA World Cup Trophy or a winner’s medal. Huh?
In June we were thrilled to receive the bronze award from Portfolios.com for our BrandMurder.com site. I’ve been checking the Portfolios site regularly because they said they would link to all of the winners in July. Well, the links are up. And, frankly, I don’t get it.
In the subcategory that our site is in, “Web Design: Experimental Web Site”, there are no gold or silver winners. How can there be a bronze winner, but no gold or silver? I don’t want to appear ungrateful, and maybe there are criteria we didn’t meet to get the gold or silver (I searched the site for the rules of how each entry is judged, without success) but doesn’t that seem kind of against the natural laws of competition?
We weren’t the only subcategory in which this happened; just as an example there are 8 subcategories in the “Web Design” category – so 8 “medals” are available at each level – but only 2 golds, 5 silvers, and 4 bronzes were given out.
(The other weird thing is that only the categories that have winners at each level are displayed on their homepage.)
There are many award sites out there, and I’ve yet to see a blank space for any of the winners. But anyway, check out who did win; award lists are always a good resource of new and/or interesting web sites.
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1:25 pm
The Portfolios.com International Awards Show is judged on a scale of 1-100. Only those who score between 90 and 100 will get a Gold award, between 80-89 a silver, between 70-79 a bronze and bewteen a 60-69 a merit. This allows Portfolios.com to keep the Gold, Silver and Bronze standards very high. That means if the highest score in any particular category is only a 75 (for example) than the highest award will be a Bronze. I hope this clarifies things a bit — if you have any questions please feel free to email me at dan@portfolios.com
Regards,
Dan Tanenbaum
President
Portfolios.com
8:37 am
Dan – thanks for dropping by and explaining. We were delighted to get the nod – especially from our peers at Portfolios.com.
10:33 am
Michael,
We are big fans of people who have the creative edge and always try to one-up themselves with every project as you obviously do. Your comment was a good one and we have placed some text to explain this to other possible confused visitors to the Winners Circle. I hope you have a great weekend.
Regards,
Dan
10:56 am
Hi Dan,
I just returned to the office after being away and wanted to thank you for taking the time to respond with an explanation of how the judging works, much appreciated!