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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)."
I know it's their right as a private company to accept any advertising they choose, but I would have thought Googles anti-gun policies would have precluded them from such an award.
If you don't yet know what that is, head there now to see for yourself. You're doing yourself a disservice by not looking :-)
While you're there make sure to contribute to the topics which are marked red (no explanation yet). That way the great service will become even better and we can all benefit from it.
I know of several schools in my country which instruct their students to go look for information there (in case the student knows english, not our native). I suppose it will only get better since academic institutions are beginning to refer to it.
"Intellectual Property" should be an affront to anyone capable of independent thought.
The Webby award site has dumbass javascript pop-up windows that link to the award winning web sites. Way to go people... take an award-winning web site and cram it into a 1/4 size pop-up for all the world to appreciate.
As it is currently inaccessible, possibly due to webby-driven traffic. Oh, the irony.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've seen a few SVG demos, and if adopted could do much of what Flash does.
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).
Very untrue. There is sometimes a HUGE difference between quality of the same flash object on the same computer, depending on what os&browser&plugin combo you use. Sometimes there's none, sometimes it makes the flash completely unviewable as intended. This is most notably true, in my experience, switching between ie and mozilla on a windows machine, or mozilla & konq on a linux machine.
The point of valid HTML w/ CSS is that, when written correctly to standards, and displayed on a standards compliant browser, it will be the same.
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.
I concur, but there needs to be more consistent distribution and development of the flash plugins. This is, understandably, not an easy thing to do given the number of combinations of os/browser possible. However, the problem exists.
Flash has its good points, you are right. The main problem is the accessibility of it, and the disgusting trend of providing no non-flash alternative, or simply providing a message saying "Sorry, this site requires Flash. Bugger off." This is pretty much like telling everyone who can't see the pretty pictures, for whatever reason, that they are not wanted.
Regardless, as long as there's no content expressed solely in Flash, and as long as it is used effectively it's OK. As a dialup user, it pisses me off, but that's not the designer's problem.
Sorry, looking over this it's actually a bit of a mindless me-too post, but I just wanted to stress the importance of alternatives to animation (and images and imagemaps, for that matter). I guess you could call me an accesibility zealot, but I think the web needs more of those.
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Try posting anything that isn't 1000% positive about apple, they go insane. I posted something last night and they mod bombed posts I made years ago so much that I was unable to post for abou 12-18 hours. Even the antigun people aren't that bad (yes, I have ran into them also)
You have to be worried when a guest presenter on Good Morning America sets up something called the "International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences". Seems like these days you can call yourself anything you want as long as you're the one who gets in first.
Yours sincerely,
Bitch Sex Demigod from Hell
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The Onion has essentially been doing the same joke for years now. They're certainly one of the funnier sites on the Web these days, but I for one found both Modern Humorist and Red vs. Blue more funny and innovative. I can see it winning People's Voice, but I'm surprised that the Webby awarders didn't spice things up a little.
"I would give my right hand to be ambidextrous."
Wrong - at least in it's current interation, most flash sites have selectable text, and if the designer is the least bit skilled (read: knows how to use the f^$^ing tools he's chosen) you should have little or no problems cutting and pasting.
.swf files to allow for the back button, etc. to work - those that you find that don't have this functionality mean the author doesn't bother to keep up with standards of his tools, and probably couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag.
Flash no longer is used as a big single timeline by the majority of professionals either, the advances in ActionScript allow for a lot more linking of small
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society - M. Twain
has had some relatively balanced articles by Al-Jazeera on it.
This seemed puzzling, until I looked at the FireSomething extension settings (which, if you aren't aware, randomizes FireFox's name) and found that my browser was currently known as "l77tspider" and reporting this information in the agent string, thus the spider-spotting! I removed 'spider' from the list of options and instantly no problems...
On a very /. side note, there is an option which allows you to provide a default name to report in case of difficulty, the standard one reads "All your Mozilla FireFox are belong to us". I changed it to "In Soviet Russia, Mozilla FireFox browses you!". I thought that was a little more up to date.
On a more relevant topic, I browsed most of the winning sites (or do so already) with Mozilla Vermiciousknid 0.8 and found no problems of that nature, not even a "best viewed in" logo or even a fscking stupid resolution recommendation. IMHO they should have won just for that!
Cheers,
Duncan
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
am i missing something, or does it seem that this doesnt deserve an award?
http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/GRAVITY/
peoples voice winner under the net art category. wtf is this site supposed to be/do?! its a stupid rocket ship. a bad one at that.
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
Might you explain what led me to do that?
l s/ Archive#Lord_Kenneth_(85%/20_votes)
Having members try to get me temp. banned because I reverted from a POV, biased article from a known problem user over three times in a 24-hour period (when the rule says, vaguely, "day"?)
How about being called immature for trying to get some "community support" on the same article because no one else wants to review changes, saying "let the community fix it"?
Me getting temp. banned then was justified, however, it was aggravated by the wonderful "community" you have going there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Quickpol
# Danny 02:04, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC) I am not condoning LK's behavior. It seems to me, however, that this is another example of how trolling and POV-pushing can push a valuable contributor away from the project. I am not opposed to disciplinary meansures, given the attacks, but I think that the problem runs much deeper than LK's actions and that these have to be addressed first
As regards deeper problems, I agree, Danny. I was sadened to see LK go into vandal mode, as despite having a tendency to fly off the handle from time to time, he was a good contributor, and endured a great deal of grief over the Jack Lynch trolling incident. I will miss him, and like you, I believe that a good deal of the reason we lose valuable contributors from time to time is that we do not handle these matters very well as yet. Tannin 02:22, 3 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I believe both Tannin and Danny are admins/sysops.
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
There weren't any "surprises given the last publicly viewable rankings". There are two sets of awards given out: the Webby award and the People's choice award. The former is decided by the academy and the latter by popular vote. The publicly viewable rankings are for the People's choice award. The nominated websites usually advertise it on their front page and get their readers to spam the people's choice vote, reducing it to a most-visited-site contest. Therefore, IMNSHO, the people's choice award is not very meaningful. For the Webby award itself there is no indication of who the winners are going to be before the final announcement.
The local pizza delivery co has a 100% flash site. It takes orders and everything - very slick. However, it was developed with Flash 7 and the latest plugin for Linux is 6.0.81.0. When I click my location on the map, the web browser segfaults.
This illustrates the problem. Flash makes you dependant on one company for your display software. When they don't keep up the support, you get locked out. Hell is only flash site I actually would use regularly and it doesn't work for me. So much for cross platform.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Being an Australian *looks at New Zealander* I find it funny when criminals that can't get their hands on guns get whacked with a cricket bat whilst attempting to rob a petrol station. This ofcourse leads to a failed robbery.
We do have the problem of robbery with a deadly syringe though still a cricket bat has a longer reach. Though I wonder, what bring a person to think they need a gun to protect themselves? what have they done personally to have to worry about this? Or why do they suffer from so much paranoia?
I'm sure Ghandi made his comment because india lost the power to fight back against an invading force. A democratic government is not an invading force, you do have a say you know.
Sadly this is the end result of the mailing list system and also of the concept of a "banned user" (whatever that is, since they always come back).
A recent user (whose name should not be pronounced any more, but who is not a banned user) recently gave as one of the reason for leaving the fact decisions were increasingly taken over irc discussions. The media of decision change, but the clique or cabal does not - although predictably the most determined advocates of cliques and social control (such as those damaging this article) fail to see they are in fact participating in such a system of social control.
IRC offers another canal of discussion which is interesting, and it may actually help in resolve some misunderstandings, but, more likely, it will simply cement those who spend a lot of time as being somehow more credible or "right".
However, it remains that the medium of discussion is not the same as the medium of presentation - the real power is not with those who contribute, not even who contribute the most or best, but with those who spend the most time influencing so-called authority, and trying to gain "infrastructure owners' trust" thereby.
The wrong idea of using another medium to make decisions, that not all users are empowered to use equally, and the wrong idea of "punishing" those who do not accept the power structure, both arise out of the idea of "community".
Neither concept makes for good editorial decisions, for example, often good articles are deleted out of process because of who wrote them, not because of what they say, and articles are "reverted" to being wrong, when they have been corrected. But both are absolutely necessary if there is to be a "community", and absolutely wrong if there is to be an "encyclopedia". The time has come to choose between the two:
The mailing list and other advocates of so-called "community" make rulership and ownership choices that are arguably contrary to the spirit of the GNU FDL - mostly the fault of mediawiki software which matches its terms imperfectly - should mediawiki actually be ditched? no doubt "the community" which includes its developers will argue it must not!
They don't even recognize community bias, or make any attempt to find a representative sample of themselves to actually represent the "users" - who are, amazingly, totally shut out in the unique Wikipedia concept of a "user community consisting only of those who speak up on specific pages by name."
The idea of "virtual community" is stupid, and probably evil - it is epistemic community masquerading as real community with sad and predictable social consequences: people unable to tell a political dispute from a bodily threat, people unable to conceive of political methods of dispute resolution that are not themselves based on invasion and war.
Plus the more pathetic consequences of people thinking they are making friends by typing, when they are really only making conspiracies and alliances to do things that do not matter all that much.
Darwikinism and a battlefield of ideas are more rational ways to run an encyclopedia, and can reward competence and a history of good edits, not whining, lying, and relationships with the bosses:
"The community", like any community, rewards all the wrong things - its social capital is built on pleasing and helping *friends*, NOT actually serving users.
The mailing list system favours those incompetent people who speak up there, over comp