At the Webby Awards, It’s Best to Be Brief
“I’m the king of the world--wide Web!” crowed Colin Needham upon acceptance of his third Webby Award for the evening. Racking up two trophies for Amazon.com and one more for the Internet Movie Database, Needham said it all with his allotted five-word acceptance speech. (Well, actually he used eight.) The five-worder has become a quirky bit of mandatory brevity that distinguishes the Webby Award ceremony, now in its third year, from its more filibustering counterparts.
More than 3,000 digerati from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley to the far corners of the physical world descended on San Francisco last week to coo over some 22 spiraled silver statuettes that resemble a glorified Slinky. New York and San Francisco crossed swords earlier this year in a cross-continental tug of war for the Webby Awards, which are growing in size and significance as fast as your PC is aging.
It’s a testament to the populist spirit of the Web that the winning sites range from the deep-pocketed, silver-spooned sites such as CNN to such shoe-string, individualist sites as Jodi.org, an arts enterprise.
Salon magazine was named best zine for the third year running, prompting editor David Talbot to declare, “I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Shlain.” In addition to referring to Tiffany Shlain, director of the Webby event, Talbot was alluding to the magazine’s controversial coverage this past year of the Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Clinton. During the year, Salon received bomb threats for its revelation of Henry Hyde’s extramarital affair.
Of his thoughts about racking up yet a third Webby Award, Talbot commented, “I’ve been saying all day that I feel like Tom Hanks.”
Another return winner was BabyCenter.com. “For people who are new parents, it’s a special time in their life,” Matt Glickman said. “And we’ve created a site for them and that’s why we won.”
BabyCenter has been in the news of late for marketing the “The Millennium Kit,” a $50 package that assists those eager to have a Y2K baby, a baby born on Jan. 1, 2000. The kit provides (nearly) everything you need to get pregnant, including a fertility book and romantic candles. March 27 through April 9 is the target zone for conceiving a millennium baby.
In the humor category, this year’s winner was the Onion, a faux tabloid that was once a college campus-circulated humor newsletter. The Onion’s readership exploded when it went up on the Web three years ago.
A few choice headlines include: “Geopolitical Balance of Power Somehow Unaffected by Death of Princess Diana” and “Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia.”
Some award winners made the most of their five words. PBS Online’s Cindy Johanson, declared, “This is for Tinky Winky!”
The Exploratorium, winner of the science award, enticed new surfers with the promise: “No ads, no registration.”
To see the full list of winners, scoot your mouse over to https://www.webbyawards.com. This page is, indeed, the ultimate in bookmarks.
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Erika Milvy writes about arts and entertainment from her home in San Francisco. She can be reached at erika@well.com.
