The March 2000 installment of "Your Internet Connection" (http://www.comsoc.org/livepubs/ci1/public/2000/mar/ciint.html) was dedicated to the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) awards for the second time in 20 months. Key3Media (http://www.key3media.com), formerly known as Ziff-Davis Events, recently reevaluated the program and decided to postpone the GII Awards for 2001. Therefore, this year we decided to focus on a different, but certainly not less celebrated, Web award recognition program: the Webby Awards (http://www.webbyawards.com), whose Fifth annual award ceremony took place in San Francisco, California, in June 2001. In May of last year I had an opportunity to be in San Francisco's prestigious Nob Hill area during the Webby Awards ceremony. Although yours truly had nothing to do personally with the Webby Awards -- I simply happened to be in the area participating in a panel discussion on security in a much less glamorous, but not less important, e-health conference, Toward Electronic Patient Records (TEPR), organized in May 2000 by the Medical Record Institute (http://www.medrecinst.com/conferences/tepr/2000/schedule/main/wednesday/w29.shtml/) -- I was very much impressed by the glitz, glamour, costumes, and the attention received by the Webby Award ceremony from the media and regular folks waiting in line for several blocks on Nob Hill. Therefore, I decided then, my next column on Web Awards has to be dedicated to this interesting event.
So here we come: one year later the Fifth Webby Awards ceremony took place on July 18, 2001, in a no less respectable part of San Francisco: the War Memorial Opera House. Presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (http://www.iadas.net/) and considered by some the Oscars for the Web, this year's economic atmosphere and the downfall of dot.coms certainly influenced the ceremony. Some of the participants even joked that to get nominated for the Sixth Annual Webby Awards in 2002, all one has to achieve is to "stay alive." On the other hand, the fancy and certainly expensive Webby Awards ceremony this year certainly demonstrated substantial levels of support from its sponsors and participants. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who launched the ceremony, even equated the importance of Webby Awards for the City of San Francisco to their major league professional baseball and football teams!
In total contrast to their cinematographic cousin, the Webby Awards have an interesting and quite refreshing rule for acceptance speeches, limiting these to five words or less! Such valuable laconism generates some very interesting and welcome diversity of idioms and expressions, from Plastic's "Bankruptcy never felt so good" to Microsoft's "I update, therefore I am." For a full list of acceptance speeches, which comfortably fits on one page for a change see http://www.webbyawards.com/main/press/speeches.html
Webby Awards are presented to Web sites in several categories. And (as they say at the Oscars) the winners of the Fifth International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences are:
By the way, if you are interested in watching the Fifth Annual Webby Awards ceremony on the Web, it is in fact available (and recommended, assuming you have an appropriate Internet connection of at least 300 kb/s ;-)) at http://www.webbyawards.com/main/webcast/index.html.
As for the future, the call for nominations for the Sixth Annual Webby Awards has yet to be announced. You may want to subscribe to their 011 Newsletter at http://www.webbyawards.com/main/in_motion/newsletter.html to stay on top of announcements of the exact dates.