Call me a grinch. Yesterday Belgian tech and web consumer magazine Clickx held its annual Website of the Year Awards. If anything, the results only tell me the sorry state the Belgian web seems to be in – or at least the users who voted for the finalists.

Take the Food & Drink category. Winner here is Recepten Magazine which has no search or RSS but does offer “a newsletter every 15th of the month”. Wow. And look at that dashing header design.

Newspapers brings us the best of current affairs analysis and interactive user media with HLN, our very own tabloid. Belgian Pride.

Not a winner by the way, but worth your while, is the news portal Krantenkoppen (Headlines) wich mashes and aggregates all the content fit to serve. It does it like this:

In Leisure and Hobby, obvious winner had to be Tuinadvies (Garden Advice). They even have a print version! With 2,500 subscribers. They also use Comic Sans! Yay.

Sorry. A couple of the winners or runners-up are interesting enough. But these results fill me with shame.

More of what our cutting edge web looks like? Have a laugh here.

I promise: later this week I’ll show you some cool Belgian sites. We’re not fully retarded you see.