I think this is an excellent idea. However, I don't think it should be based solely on votes or C!s, since as borgo pointed out this preferences writeups submitted earlier in the year, and also is subject to the whims of who logged on when, how many other writeups were submitted around that time, how many C!s people had, etc.

So here's what I think we should do...

First, borgo should select a committee of willing participants to go through all the nodes and select the "nominees," just as with a real awards show. Some categories will have far fewer than others, so maybe those people could do more than one. Each category could have, say, 5 nominees.

Second, we should get somebody to make a simple superdoc tool to sort writeups by type first, and then by either reputation or C!s. This should be very simple for somebody with the coding chops to work up (in10se? DonJaime?). The nominating committee can then use this tool to scan for promising candidates (rather than blindly reading every single writeup).

Third, we can use the everything user poll to have everyone read and vote on the five nominees in each category! Each category could have, say, a three-day window to be voted on, and then borgo can writeup the results!

We should aim to have the nominations finished by mid January, and then vote in the second half of January, I think.

Update, 12/21/2014 - I made a tool for narrowing down the best candidates for each writeup type, with invaluable assistance from jaybonci and DonJaime! It's publicly accessible over at Nodes of the Year. You can also use it to find forgotten gems of yesteryear!