our mascot
Shemoqmedi (შემოქმედი) is Georgian for creator. The crow is how we find them.
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Crows collect valuable things.
Shemoqmedi Space collects valuable webpages.
Not everything that glitters
The old story says crows and magpies steal anything shiny. It is mostly folklore: in a 2014 study at the University of Exeter, magpies were wary of shiny objects, not drawn to them.
Crows don't grab whatever sparkles. They look, they test, they choose. So do we: a site is never listed for its effects alone. It is kept for being good.
What a crow knows
One of the cleverest animals on earth.
- 01
They make tools
New Caledonian crows cut hooks from twigs and leaves, shape them, and keep the ones that work.
Here: We look at how a site is made, not only at how it looks.
- 02
They remember faces
Crows in Seattle that met researchers in a mask scolded that mask for years, and taught crows that had never seen it to do the same.
Here: Every site credits the people who made it, by name.
- 03
They plan ahead
In a 2017 study, ravens picked a tool and saved it for a task they could only do the next day.
Here: Awards run on a calendar: the day, the month, the year.
- 04
They keep what they find
The Clark's nutcracker, of the crow family, hides tens of thousands of seeds each autumn and finds them again months later, under snow.
Here: Every award is dated and archived. Nothing kept is lost.
Older than the web
Every culture that watched crows gave them the same job.
Norse
Thought and Memory
Odin kept two ravens, Huginn and Muninn. Each morning they flew out over the world; each evening they came back and told him what they had seen.
Ancient Greece
The crow and the pitcher
Aesop's thirsty crow drops pebbles into a jug until the water rises to its beak. In 2009, rooks in a Cambridge lab solved the same puzzle the same way.
Pacific Northwest
The bringer of light
In Haida and Tlingit stories, Raven steals the light a chief kept locked in a box and lets it out into the sky, for everyone.
Japan
The guide
Yatagarasu, the three-legged crow, led the first emperor through the mountains. It is on the crest of Japan's national football team today.
Messenger, guide, keeper of memory: go out into the world and bring back what matters. That is the job here too.
The brand symbol
The crow on the line
On every badge the crow stands on a line. The line is the bar, and the crow only stands on work that clears it: a badge is drawn for an award a site really won, with its date, and only the site's owner can get one.
Its colour says how far the site went.
- SilverHonorable Mention
- BlackSite of the Day
- RedSite of the Month
- GoldSite of the Year
The web has never been bigger, or more alike.
Templates and AI can put up a thousand websites before lunch. When anyone can make a site in a minute, a website isn't rare anymore. A good one is, and so is someone with the eye to find it.
Crows do best in the busiest cities on earth. They learn the noise, then they pick out what is worth keeping. The web is the busiest city there is.
Bring the crow something worth keeping.
Sources: Hunt, Nature (1996); Marzluff et al., Animal Behaviour (2010); Kabadayi & Osvath, Science (2017); Vander Wall & Balda (1977); Shephard et al., Animal Cognition (2014); Bird & Emery, Current Biology (2009). About Shemoqmedi