On January 6, 1838 there was the first demonstration of Samuel Morse’s telegraph, but I would like to take advantage of this Almanac to tell another page in the history of Italian digital. This.
Until a few months before the arrival of the pandemic, at a certain point of the year, that heterogeneous community we called the “blogosphere” was waiting for the verdict of Gianluca Neri and his popular jury for the best sites and posts. For many years the Macchianera Italian Awards (Mia) was an appointment of some importance (in 2013 Gianluca Neri personally handed over the prize to the Vatican to Pope Francis as a person of the year).
Gianluca who is now 51 years old and leads a TV production company that has signed notable products such as Sanpa, at the time it was one of the most lively references on the Net. After having participated in the glorious satirical weekly Heart, in 1996 he founded and edited the satirical portal Clarence, which had a good success. And he had started the Macchianera blog.
The first cry of what will become a real and awaited prize was a simple post titled The Macchia Weblog Awards 2003. On January 6, in fact. It was an ironic post, in the style of the author, but it is interesting to reread it because it tells about some of the protagonists of the Net of the time, when there were very few users on the Web. Here are some of the winners of that first edition:
- Best name for a weblog: Blogorroico
- Worst name per weblog: InSonia
- Weblog with more participation: Claudio Sabelli Fioretti
- Best source of ideas: ManteBlog by Massimo Mantellini
- Best weblog of gossip: Dagospia
- Weblog of the year: Wittgenstein by Luca Sofri, also awarded for the Re: no subject column, a dialogue with Christian Rocca’s blog, Camillo
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