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Webby Award 2004 Winners Announced
ivar writes "Over at the official site, the 2004 Webby Award Winners have been announced. There were a few surprises given the last publicly viewable rankings - I guess they keep the last few days in secrecy for a reason." The press release announcing the winners has more detail, noting: "Reflecting the egalitarian spirit of the internet, winners ranged from Wikipedia.org (Best Community), a free, community-built encyclopedia, to the official site for the Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War (Best Film), to web powerhouses like Google (Best Practices and Best Services)."
There's nothing worse for the web than Flash. Can't be bookmarked, needs a plugin, version dependent, source can't be studied, and the W3C has no control over it.
Valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS are the way to go, no matter who or what's writing it.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
The 2004 Webby Award Winners have been announced.
I don't understand. Wikipedia and Google are cool and everything... but what about Slashdot??
I thought the Webby's were made irrelevant back at the end of the 90s. With so many web sites and services, this award has no meaning what-so-ever. Oh well, I guess some things don't know when they're dead.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Wikipedia (and affiliates) should be on that list because the interface is clean. It's easy to get around and go off on tangent while searching something. It's open...and it's educational. I learned a lot of cool facts.
Like where the " All your base are belong to us " come from. And yes, ive just proved that I am not worthy of reading Slashdot because I didn't know wtf that came from.MY SECRET DIARIES
Sorry to see Groklaw not on the list, especially in the law group. I've learned more about the law in the last year from that site than I learned anywhere else...by far. It is also an example of a true community site that formed by self-selection. People just flocked to the site and made it what it became. The power of many-eyes in action, this time to discuss legal cases that could greatly impact our tech lives.
I know that Flash is not popular here on Slashdot. No flamebait or trolling intended, but you gotta realize we are no longer in the world of lynx. You may still use it, I may still use it on occasion (just like you and I may still use vi or emacs), but the general public wants multimedia content. While it is true that Flash requires a plugin, so do many other things (such as java on mozilla). The necessity of a plugin does not make something inherently bad (IMO).
Flash allows for cross-browser, cross-platform web development. If I create a Flash animation I do not have to worry about how it will appear on Mac/Linux/Windows/Netscape/Mozilla/IE/Opera. It will be consistent across all platforms. The same cannot be said for HTML and CSS. Even though standards have been set, rendering software does not always abide by those standards (mainly this only applies to MS).
Long story short, and I know it's slightly OT, I think Flash is a great way to present good looking multimedia content with a (relatively) small footprint. What does bother me are websites that do flash-only, or use flash unnecessarily. You should not design an ENTIRE site in flash, and if you do you should at least provide a non-flash site for your users.
Just my $.02
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
I nominated www.thehun.net and I dont see it as a winner. This contest was rigged. We all know they get 10x as many hits as slashdot. ;)
"Best" community?
I would consider slashdot or something awful to have far superior communities. Sure, the idea is great (I sometimes contribute to wikipedia here), but let's be honest with wikipedia-- trolls are almost unstoppable, and many editors and admins I have met are rude and lazy, following the moto "Let the wikiprocess sort it out"-- using that as an excuse to have someone else fix it. And of course nobody does-- and when you do you get labeled "POV, troll, fanatic", etc.
Quacks, paranormalists, spiritualists, creationists, and various other people quickly hunt down opposition and try to silence it any way they can. One guy even got into a war over the capitilization of "god" (was not referring to any specific god) and the issue took a long time to resolve.
Maybe if you're looking up info for London or Al Capone or the economy in 1945 the thing is good-- but for anything remotely controversial, such as science, skeptics, religion, I would not recommend it simply because of the "community" at wikipedia I have experienced firsthand.
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
I'm probably being trolled here, but I'll bite: given that human rights are meaningless without the means to defend oneself against human rights violators (from muggers to Government employees) - how can you support free speech, freedom of religion etc. without supporting RKBA (Right to Keep & Bear Arms)?
And in case you're wondering, I'm not American, I'm a New Zealander. Not all RKBA supporters are American.
Interesting argument - yes, guns are less effective nowadays against Government violations because of the size, funding levels, & armaments of the Government agencies.
However, all the evidence suggests that guns are excellent tools of self-defense against private criminals - see Gun Facts for the proof.
Carstuckgirls????
WTF is the web coming to???
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Exactly. They give one side, fox gives the other. The truth lies somewhere in between. That is why it's important to have both.
Every single Flash app is re-inventing the wheel. Unlike HTML, there are no common Flash widgets (or at least none that I've seen in various places). The usability is shot to hell. Users can't apply their own styles. Can I even cut and paste text from a Flash app? Most don't let me.
Flash does have it's place. The Washington Post and NY Times often have nice Flash side-bars that can make an electoral map or poll results come alive. But in general, I don't think Flash enhances the web experience.
My experience is that the people who will get into conflicts are mostly those who have a problem with our neutrality policy. They feel that Wikipedia should clearly label certain views as nonsense. Of course people can never agree on what is and isn't nonsense, so they fight all day about it. But our policy states that in such cases, what we do is attribute the claims from both sides to their adherents.
Now, there are often misunderstandings regarding that policy, such as the belief that we have to give pseudoscience "equal time" in science articles. This is addressed in some detail in th actual policy page: NPOV and pseudoscience. And of course there are religious fanatics and other hardcore believers who find it difficult to work together and insist on the exclusion of certain points of view or on the prominent inclusion of their own in articles which have nothing to do with their belief system (e.g. religious views in scientific articles). However, as we develop and refine our policies, these cases become increasingly rare.
There is of course always conflict, and it contributes to truly adding all perspectives to an article. However, in terms of civility, Wikipedia fares much better than most other online communities, not least because we have a clear policy against personal attacks. In terms of getting the facts right, I have described several ideas in my campaign platform for the upcoming Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election.
dude, you're from new zealand, one of the most peaceful countries in the world. low crime rate, low violent crime rate, no nukes, no wars.
cities in america such as new york and washington have amongst the HIGHEST rates of gun murders and assaults in the world.
america is riddled with guns and riddled with gun violence. new zealand is NOT riddled with guns and, coincidentally, NOT riddled with gun violence. hmmm..
look at the school shootings in the US. kids carrying guns to school, guns they have often sourced from their own homes, ie; guns that were intended for self-defence as you describe.
do you really think you'd hold the same view if that was your reality?
because I'm right
:)
What exactly do you think you are right about? Google won an award for building the world's most useful website. This fact is completely independent of the fact that they refuse to take ad money from gun makers. Why should something so irrelevant as their ad choices determine whether or not they are eligible for a Webby?
In short, you have failed to consider the possibility that you were modded troll because your post was a troll. i.e., you used a completely unrelated news item to shout about some random pet peeve of yours. That's a troll, isn't it? If not, it's at least off-topic.
Anyway, it's moot now, since your post is now at +5. Congrats on successfully gaming the system...
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Just about every site listed had a tilt to the left.
It's about as egalitarian as Pravda in the old days.
Nice to know that some things never really change.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
i would agree, we don't see this in canada (or nz, i've since learned they have quite a high % of gun ownership) because the USA has a fundamental problem of violence (ie; guns don't kill people, people kill do).
however, as in my example above, the problem is accentuated by the fact that guns have in some cases been accessible to children, which is a result of people having guns in their homes.
if the guns weren't available, then they would not have been an option in those cases.
Somewhere near the BBC. I think more Americans should read what the rest of the world is saying. American media is reknowned for being amazingly biased and blinkered.
Get your own free personal location tracker
I don't whine about Fox News -- I view them as entertainment. I also enjoy the Weekly World News, FWIW. As Lionel pointed out, watch a Fox newscast, and count the number of times the phrases, "Get this," and "This guy," are used. Sounds a bit like something you'd hear in a Bar.
I think Fox is probably slightly right-of-center editorially, which is a nice balance to CNN, which is left-of-center. The major networks fall somewhere in between the two. I work in talk radio -- I make no claim of being objective as far as the commentary goes on the station. With news events, however, I try just to report the facts. I do local news mostly, and there's not much political commentary you can put into a story on a house fire, or a fatal car accident.
Al-Jazeera, on the other hand, goes beyond being pro-Arab. As you say, it is propaganda. That it's even mentioned as a nominee casts quite a bit of doubt on the legitimacy of the other nominations with the Webby Awards. While I did poke fun at Fox News, I am dismayed by the other nominees. Also included were PBS and BBC, which are both government broadcasters. And BBC's reputation isn't the best in the world these days, what with the issue with the gentleman who killed himself over the "sexed-up" WMD documents.
So, register my comments in protest of the awards themselves, and the judges.
"Exactly. They give one side, fox gives the other. The truth lies somewhere in between. That is why it's important to have both."
Ummm, not quite. IMO the truth is far above the reach of either of them.
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Because these are the glory days of The Onion.
Ever since Bush came into office, the staff of The Onion have been racing desperately to keep their parody ahead of the rapidly-accelerating absurdity of American politics. The prime example of the difficulties they have to overcome is their now-legendary headline for Bush's Innagural address in January 2001: Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'. Reading the article today, the uncomfortable fact is that the jokes they made have basically all happened for real since then, as Dan Chak has documented. Their one concession to reality over these years was to run a completely straight article about how a muscular Austrian was running for governor of California.
Their 9/11 issue might well have won a Pulitzer if that year's judges could have figured out what to do with it (there was a marvelous article in Editor and Publisher magazine, I think, from one of those judges recounting how they passed it around the room in stunned silence). Then there's their recent take on Condoleeza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission In all of America, only Jon Stewart's Daily Show and The Onion have managed to continue to parody politics faster than it can become a parody of itself. That's no mean feat.