Webby Awards: The Good, Badly Dressed, Bankrupt
Only at the Webbys would Intel Corp. Chairman Andy Grove share the spotlight with a costumed Peter Pan wannabe and a beefy, bewigged sendup of the late female impersonator Divine.
In a glitzily offbeat celebration as diverse as the Internet itself, the powerful and the bizarre came together to party in the face of adversity Wednesday night at the fifth annual Webby Awards.
Administered by an independent academy, awards honoring the world’s best Web sites were handed out by Grove and other presenters in 30 categories, with the winners limited to five-word acceptance speeches.
Honorees ranged from Microsoft Corp., which was booed when it took the technical achievement prize for programs that automatically update Windows software, to the green-tights-clad Randy Constan, who won in the “weird” category for his site depicting himself as Peter Pan.
The good-natured defiance of this year’s post-market-crash proceedings was summed up best by Tim Cavanaugh, a laid-off editor at Plastic, which won for best online magazine after the site’s parent company closed its doors.
“Bankruptcy never felt so good,” Cavanaugh told the record 3,000 attendees at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House.
The scene was different in ways large and small from the 2000 Webbys. Last year, the ceremony was marked by frenzied guerrilla marketing, as cash-rich dot-coms dispatched employees to pull attention-getting stunts and distribute trinkets.
This year, the only noticeable marketing outside the building was a portable billboard with a your-name-here advertisement for the billboard company itself.
Last year, protesters showed up to complain that Internet companies were displacing families in working-class areas of San Francisco.
This year, the emcee, actor Alan Cumming, joked that a homeless person had asked him for a quarter to buy shares in DoubleClick, an Internet advertising company.
There also appeared to be less donated food and fewer volunteers, though the Webby organizers denied any downshifting.
Webby director Tiffany Shlain said that for many in the Internet industry, the last 12 months resembled a soured love affair. “When you wake up, not only is he gone, but so is all the furniture,” she said in her opening remarks.
Several of this year’s nominees were out of business by the time of the ceremony, and many others are struggling. Magazine nominee Feed is gone, as is technical achievement nominee Popular Power.
Some winners, particularly small companies and sites run by hobbyists, are faring much better.
VolunteerMatch, which links good deeds with people who want to do them, won both best activism site and best services site.
Popular Internet search engine Google took the award for best practices.
“The Wall Street worries can be distracting to companies,” said Google co-founder and President Sergey Brin. “It also makes you inflexible. We were never in a hurry to go public, and now we’re fortunate that we didn’t.”
Many winners said the Internet is emerging better and wiser, if slimmer, than when scores of Web companies were valued at billions of dollars.
“The hype is gone, which is good. We need to concentrate on doing what’s right,” said Craig Newmark, the founder of community winner Craigslist, which catalogs available jobs, apartments and cars and offers discussion forums.
Among the categories hardest hit by the downturn was news, where four out of five nominees have had layoffs. The news winner was Inside, which was suffering before being acquired by Brill Media Holdings. By coincidence, the site on Wednesday began charging for virtually all of its content.
Inside Editor in Chief Michael Hirschorn said Inside’s change echoes a broader Web shift away from free, high-quality material.
“There’s a certain nostalgic quality for the Web of yore,” Hirschorn said. “The Web of today and tomorrow will probably come with less wacky costumes and more bottom-line oriented business models.”
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2001 Webby Award Winners Activism: VolunteerMatch www.volunteermatch.org Broadband: Heavy www.heavy.com Commerce: Travelocity.com www.travelocity.com Community: Craigslist www.craigslist.org Education: NationalGeographic.com www.nationalgeographic.com Fashion: Hint Fashion Magazine www.hintmag.com Film: Requiem for a Dream www.requiemforadream.com Finance: Yahoo Finance finance.yahoo.com Games: 3D Groove www.3dgroove.com Government & Law: Nolo: Law for All www.nolo.com Health: Planned Parenthood Golden Gate www.ppgg.org Humor: The Onion www.theonion.com Kids: Fact Monster www.factmonster.com Living: Campaign for Our Children www.cfoc.org Music: Sputnik7 www.sputnik7.com News: [Inside] www.inside.com Personal: Dancing Paul www.dancingpaul.com Politics: OpenSecrets.org www.opensecrets.org Print & Zines: Plastic www.plastic.com Radio: BBC World Service www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice Science: +Plus plus.maths.org Services: VolunteerMatch www.volunteermatch.org Spirituality: Zen www.do-not-zzz.com Sports: Swell www.swell.com Travel: Expedia.com www.expedia.com TV: PBS www.pbs.org Weird: The Home Page of Peter Pan www.pixyland.org/peterpan Best Practices: Google www.google.com Arts: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries www.yhchang.com Technical Achievement: Microsoft Windows Update windowsupdate.microsoft.com LifeTime Achievement: Ray Tomlinson, Douglas Engelbart
