by Gerard Coulombe

Created on: October 14, 2009   Last Updated: October 15, 2009

Earning writing badges at Helium is a lot like playing bingo. You lose some. You win some. You could easily end up having none at all emblazoned on your profile. A lot depends on the kinds of risks one takes as a writer.

A writer's best badge is his name. Name recognition is not a given. A writer who is honest, forthright and knowledgeable, too, earns it. It's a safe bet that a writer who has attained name recognition will have something intelligent, informative or even provocative to say about the subject of his chosen discourse.

His cumulative portfolio is what is important. It will contain the most excellent and successful as well as some of the less successful or even least successful pieces. It is precisely because Helium requires one to write often and almost always competitively that it is unlikely that one's performance can retain the qualities of the better pieces the writer writes.

The Helium system has a built in tension between production and one's successes or lack of it and status. Only those writers alert to all the tensions in the system can survive for very long in the limelight.

Writing badges are like merit badges that appeal to boy scouts. On the one hand, merit badges are very good because they indicate that the bearer believes in the Boy Scout Motto: Be Prepared. A writer at Helium or for any other outlet should be prepared if he or she considers the job to be one of merit. And it should be one of merit.

On the other hand, some can never have enough badges. They're like Eagle Scouts with their shirt covered with badges in all appropriate places along with the sash also all covered with badges. The very appearance of an Eagle Scout on the reviewing stage at any parade is enough to make the whole community proud.

The better paper in any category ought to take top place on merit. But readers at Helium ought to know that an outcome from a submission is not one based upon editorial preference for the better paper as exercised by an editor but upon peer rating or review, if you will, without the assumption that the body of peers doing the rating possesses the professional tools for even a rudimentary assessment.

Real journalists, or writers by any other name, don't live for awards alone, although they are nice to have, especially if they are earned as recognized by one's peers. Helium badges are awarded on the basis of an intricate accounting system based upon a membership rating pool where the belief is that all things being equal in

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