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2006 Webby Award Winners Announced
Wired is reporting that the winners for the 2006 Webby Awards have been announced and the usual suspects have dominated the scene. From the article: "With a record 65 award categories, this year's Webby honorees ranged from well-known sites like the (Washington Post, a popular vote winner for best newspaper site, to more obscure newcomers, like Remember Segregation, named best home page. As in years past, the honoree list included several winners of multiple awards, along with perennial favorites that have won Webbys previously."
You guys forgot to mention that Cute Overload won the People's Voice Webby.
Come on!
I can't view a single one of those sites that I tried (gave up after 3) cuz I don't have flash.
what's a webby?
Last I checked, Google Earth was not a website.
Seriously, can they rename these things the flashies? Withouth the plugin, I can't see 90% of the pages up there. Shouldn't RememberSegregation.com be in HTML and compatible across all browsers for equality? They don't even have a separate but equal HTML version. No flash, no cigar.
The link in the Wired article should be Remember Segregation.
Joanna Glasner misspells the url and the link title "segretation."
Nice to see some one other than Slashdot kill a website.
I would personally kill the PERSONAL WEB SITE winner for messing with the size of my Firefox window. I wonder how come such arrogant annoyance of a site can win in any category?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I think this site made it onto Web Pages That Suck a while ago, so I'm glad that I can now recycle my comment of "Non-Flash user? Get to the back of the bus!" ;)
the link in story takes to the above URL, which is different from what I saw in the awards list which has dot org instead of dot com!
Those that do not remember to separate content from presentation are doomed to repeat separating content from presentation.
It's a simple spelling error. Try the real site, http://www.remembersegregation.org, and you'll get better results.
And assuming you don't mind heavy Flash usage, it is a nice site.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
I knew some of the people behind this thing, and they were for the most part shallow attention seekers with the technical expertise of your average turtle. The main reason for the webbies is to throw a giant party for their friends on someone else's dime. Back in the .com days everyone thought they were hot shit. I kinda thought they had slunk back into the marketing sewer they crawled out of. Make no mistake, geeks, the webbies were created by the popular kids who picked on us in high school, not by or for fellow geeks.
.com boom.
I mean, I could see some industry group giving out awards, like the Academy awards, or even a bunch of trade journalists, like the Golden Globes, but the webbies are just some guys who said, "How can we make a buck off this Internet thingy? I know! We can get paid to throw a huge party and hand out some made-up awards!"
Sorry for the rant, but these guys epitomize everything that was wrong with the
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What's the equivalent of the Razzies for websites?
Offtopic rant time.
" , Boolean.TRUE); which acts weird with the other workarounds on the first bug page.
Another Slashdotter here said it right: with Swing most of your time is spent fighting with components to get the user interface to look and feel right.
The fact that a bug like this is still in Java after 5 years gives me an uneasy sinking feeling in my stomach because I wanted to use Java for a project.
Take this one: to get behaviour that 99.9% of the world's developers want, you have to table.putClientProperty("terminateEditOnFocusLost
Why not make these components non-shitty by default? Do Java devs LIKE writing workarounds all the fucking time? Jesus. 5 years. I think Sun hates Java as much as I am starting to.
That list reads more like a "worst of the web: developers that don't get it". The web is for everyone, flash quite obviously is not!
"As in years past, honorees will be limited to five word acceptance speeches."
I would like to thank
Seriously though, nice to see NPR getting some props.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Anyone remember when the winner of this award was ACTUALLY weird? jodi.org perhaps? Most of these sites seem to be net.humor sites.
sig.
I actually think it would be shameful for any of the award winners to show up. I notice that the awards ceremony won't be held in San Francisco this year. I take that as further evidence that we have successfully run these clowns out of town on a rail.
"International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences"? My ass. Pray, just what sciences do these esteemed luminaries represent?
Hey, America! New York needs rescuing here. Nebraska? Wisconsin? Arkansas? West Virginia? Surely there's some other state with a town hall big enough to hold this cute little catillion, where the rest of us won't have to hear about it?
Breakfast served all day!
This is like a literary award where most of the winners are illustrators and photographers; a complete joke.
(wow this is (so cool i'm glad (slashdot (has such quality (editing.
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
It's a nice site, and it means well, but it does a couple of funny things.
First of all it uses the silhouette of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a thermometer bar to load the page. When your activist is fully black, your page is loaded. Not horribly disrespectful, but getting into strange territory.
And secondly, after the immediate shock of being presented with "are you white or colored" we're brought to the same page. So while the point of the site (and arguably this country) is "there is no separate but equal" the design of the site is leading you via separate paths to the same place.
come for the naked robots, stay for the zombies
1. BLOG - POLITICAL
WEBBY AWARD WINNER
AGENCY/CREDITED ORGANIZATION
The Huffington Post HuffingtonPost.com
http://www./ huffingtonpost.com
2. http:/// ariannaonline.huffingtonpost.com/
3. http://www.webbyawards.com/about/index.php:
The Academy is an intellectually diverse organization that includes members such as musicians Beck and David Bowie, Internet inventor Vint Cerf, political columnist Arianna Huffington...
It looks like 500 members of the Academy is a huge pool to pick the ~50 (?) winners from...
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Does anyone really pay any attention to these awards? The headline for the Wired article says it all really - "usual suspects dominate Webbys" - in other words, every year they revisit the same limited pool of websites. Of course, they can't ignore what's popular, but it's laughable that they describe themselves as a "leading international award" when the sites that have won are almost all US-centric with a few nods to the UK. Is that their idea of "international"? And how on earth did the World bank get an award for activism?!
donkey; ass; whatever.
There is an ad agency called Pirate Radio and Television. One of the directors Terry O'Reilly (not the book guy) did a fantastic series on CBC radio about advertising. So, knowing the guy's name and the part of the name of the agency, I googled "Terry O'Reilly" and "pirate". The company's web site didn't make the first page of the google results. Their web site is completely flash. The search engines can't find anything to search for. btw. Leo Burnett (another ad agency) didn't have that problem.
These guys call themselves an advertising agency and you can't even find their web site even if you know what you're looking for. Not good for the credibility.
Your comments about flash are right on. When I'm on the web, I'm usually looking for information. I resent having to wait while the eye candy loads. One of the other posters wondered why a web site that might attract blind people was all in flash. Good question. If they accept government money, they are probably breaking the law. Around here, the law says that if you are being paid by the government, your site has to be accessible.
You don't see me whining that gmail doesn't work in lynx. Grow up. The plugin takes what, 1 second to install?
Oh, I know I know, "But I don't want it".
If you don't want to install technology to allow you to view web pages, you should not be posting on an article about awards to many webpages. You should fully expect to only ever see a fraction of the internet out there.
You're like a video collector... who wants everything to be in one codec. That just ain't gonna happen. The more codecs you install, the more videos you can play (and no, VLC doesn't play everything...).
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Did I win? How much to I get?
Find coupons in Greeley
I also forwarded the email to my associates, Panikovsky and Balaganov, I thought they would enjoy the services of such a nice company.
We-Make-Money-Not-Art and Snopes won their respective categories, giving me some hope.
Was that a low blow?
Why, yes. Yes it was.
Quote from the organization:
"After an exhaustive search of about 38 web sites we have chosen the top 37 in a variety of categories. Although we realize there are about 14 billion web sites we did not visit, we feel pretty good about our choices."
Mark Cuban and Thomas Friedman get awarded "Special Achievement" status? All Cuban does is wax inspid on his blog and yell at basketball referees. Friedman wrote a rambling tome extolling in mixed metaphors and incredibly poor prose his abiding love and faith in globalism, and how technology is bringing us into an age of equality, even though warfare, genocide, concentration of wealth, poverty, and starvation are worsening. A World Bank (an organization responsible for much of the above) Website gets an award for "activism?" I don't think so. A client-side app gets several awards (Google Earth)? The whole site is essentially Globalism propaganda mixed with other forms of idiocy, ignorance, and ineptitude.
And on top of all that, the "Web"by site's not even valid HTML. These guys are supposed to be authoritative, and their own house is in disarray.
Absolute garbage.
Only problem with their heavy Flash usage is that they don't provide an HTML site, which makes it utterly useless on my machine. I run Ubuntu on an Apple iBook and there is no PPC Linux version of Flash, so a site that uses only Flash might as well not exist. Anyway, I haven't found a legitimate reason for a site to use Flash so it's not like I feel like I'm missing out on anything. Hope the webmasters on those Flash-only sites eventually realize they might as well not have a website to those of us who won't or can't use Flash.
They nominated The Onion in the news site category? And it won the Humor category? Does their left mouse button not know what their right mouse button is doing?
End of Line.
Flash is just glitz. Yes, anyone who puts information that you are searching for into a flash needs to be shot. But there's more to life than textual information. We have gone way past the days of Lynx and Gopher, which I remember fondly.
You, sir, resist progress. Here's a bad car metaphor (seems to be a slashdot thing): You want a corvette, but you are unwilling to do so beucase you don't want chrome. Instead, you drive an Amish horse cart.
And please.... "Untrusted 3rd party ap"? Yes, Al Queda is going to install something on your computer that kills you, but only if Sony has rootkitted you first. Please. Anything with 90% market penetration is de facto more trusted than most things.
But I bet you don't have a problem with open source software. And I bet you don't see how that makes you a hypcrite either.
So to summarize: You believe in your ideals to the point where you will cripple your own ability to work outside your own very-narrow confines.
Oh, and some levity: Maybe you should just use the JAWS screen-reader and only visit 508-complaint Flash sites. You'll get your text equivalent then.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I choose not to register my opinion on this matter.
But Flash can also do things that HTML cannot do. That is called.........(drumroll)......... progress.
I'm sure when the web was created, there were people who talked about how "we don't need images", "all the information I search for is textual, so why would I want images?"
I'm also sure the same types of people were anti-soundcard, when sound cards first came out for computers. "I just want information, I don't want to hear stuff."
Some people lack imagination.
Incidentally, AVOID chicken pox. It can lead to shingles as an adult. Intentionally infecting children isn't helping then, it's hurting them. Adult chicken pox is very bad, but shingles can make you feel pain non-stop for the rest of your life.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
WHAT www.ircimages.com didn't win anything!!! it was probably their year LAST year then..... -QAK
glad to see http://www.healthline.com/ got one.
So you agree? What other reason would I be visiting a web page for? Sure we have images, but I often browse with them disabled (as is my choice) and it's vary rare for somebody to create an entire site using images. Even if someone has been stupid enough to craft an entire site using images, if they used alt tags the navigation still works.
What possible reason would I have to trust Adobe/Macromedia? These are companies that do not trust their end-users (witness Adobes ebook DRM).
**cough** Fallacy!
No, I don't have a problem and no, I don't see how that makes me a hypocrite. Even if flash were open source, there's no way I'd execute bytecode from remote servers.
You're wrong and you couldn't know what my ideals are.
Ahh yes, I see the slogan now. "Flash: crippling the world wide web, one page at a time". Thanks.
They are actually different places. Not the same place, i'd have to assume that you didn't read anything on the site to come to the conclusion you do.
Why am I not surprised that the WonderBra page is one of the nominees?
Proverbs 21:19
However, you are in no position to complain about new web technology when you disable OLD web technology that is 15+ years old (images).
I think the fact that you disable images completely proves the gist of what I was said. You cripple your machine intentionally, then complain when other people use features you have disabled.
You are greatly raising smug levels. This is bad for the environment.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I'm impressed :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I would sooner believe David Blaine is a magician than the Webby Awards are the Oscars of the Internet.
By the number of flash winners it's clear that the webby's are still out of touch with reality.
I work for one of the companies that happened to win a "People's Choice Award". Strange that when we were first nominated, we were dead last. An e-mail went out to the whole company asking us to vote... miraculously, we went from last to first place in about 10 minutes. A few days ago, we had a 'reminder' e-mail, in case we didn't vote the first time.
So I guess the "People's Choice" can also be the "Nominees Choice".
Yup, after checking out their website, it appears that the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences exists solely for the purpose of running the Webby awards.
"Membership in The Academy is currently by invitation only and is limited to those individuals who have catalyzed great achievements on the Internet, demonstrated extraordinary talent in a traditional medium, or who possess in-depth knowledge of new media and comprehensive familiarity with a broad range of sites within a category."
So there's a buzzword filled load of crap that means: we invite our friends and people who we think are important.
I guess it's probably a good racket though. More credit to them for thinking of it and making it work. Just don't expect anyone to give a rat's ass about the awards.
There's a good description here.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
The screenreader stuff can work with NO additional markup. It depends on the type of text box you use in Flash. Obviously I'm a bit rusty or I'd specify precisely what that type is. Also, although JAWS ignores it, OBJECT tags can have ALT attributes. And I still have yet to meet any of these blind friends people keep claiming to have :) But we brought a blind guy into work to test some of our flash stuff. It was interesting watching him eat a strawberry.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Try finding a native AMD64 Flash plugin.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
I guess they think porn is not important enough to make a category about. Not even the soft stuff like 'erotica'...
Very stange considering that porn is largely responible for the growth of the web.
I think not.
Either I am missing your point (quite likely), or your posting was by far the most pitiful of the lot.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
So now people can't read text without being distracted by an image? Are you in need of some ritalin? (Glad you thought the joke was cute, but I stole it.)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
NPGMusicClub clearly worked in HTML, I could mouseover the image placeholders as they loaded, clearly indicating HTML image links, not flash. There were flash elements. Not installing flash would certainly ugly it up. This is still, to me, no reason not to install flash, and no reason for the authors to not use flash. The site has a link to bypass the flash and the site itself is not flash. That's like complaining that a porn site has a welcome page with an image on it, and you only want textual porn.
BigFatInstitute is an abomination. I still don't see this as a reason not to install flash. This is an example of idiocy at it's finest, though. But still -- any person who wants to use his computer to go to thie site can do so, unless they are some zealot who insists on using an operating system that cannot support this. Ooooh "untrusted code"! Oh no!!@!@!@
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
How could Disney.com and FamilyFun.com not even be nominated?
Weak weak weak
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
Anyway...
Anyway, I don't see how "it works in javascript" is a good response. We weren't talking about javascript. My answer was accurate, but I guess one can never be too precise (accuracy vs precision) these days. I should have named every technology used. Or perhaps, you are making an argument against javascript too? My god, are abacuses and sextants and slide rules somehow involved too? :)
If you're arguing against javascript, you've really lost me now (not that you should care... well... *I* think you should:)). If 99% of the world can do something and your operating systems don't support that -- that is a big, big, big, big weakness on their part. Computers need to be albe to use new technologies as they come out, not 10 years later.
(I'm still aching over the 2000 experience of learning that Quake1 wont support a SoundBlaster original in RedHat 6.2/whatever-at-the-time. I mean... that's like... the original sound card. </tangent>)
I worked with markup code in 1993, I don't know when HTML technically came out but at the time no-one knew what HTML was. When HTML came along, it was just like "oh, another one of these". Sorry, another tangent.
Your use of the word "history" is something noteable to me. I use windows primarily for historical reasons myself. I grew up on DOS. I had my own command-line environment of various scripts & binaries on my first 20M harddrive, and that folder still exists today as the first folder in my %PATH (translation: $PATH) (hehe) and gets used extensively. When cygwin came along it pretty much did everything that I used my unix shell accounts for natively on my own machine, and I found myself no longer using ssh anymore. Every day, I run scripts that write scripts that then run. I use tab-filename completion every few minutes. I have automatic replications of important harddrive repositories (and 3 terabytes of space across 4 computers). I grep constantly. I have TV-out and have used a 36-inch TV as my primary screen for awhile now (Warrantee clock says it's been on over 30,000 hrs since 8/1999 which is rather insane if you work the math out.) I haven't used a cd player in 5 yrs. My music is broadcast on FM radio throughout my house and my computer can also turn off lights. I've used TV-out for 11 years.
And when my friends are over sometimes it's nice to show them an ugly website on a 36-inch TV connected to a 100wx5+16'sub soundsystem with an optical digital cable (no ground loop buzz)...
But hey... maybe I'm not going down the right path, but generally I don't meet people who use their stuff as... efficiently(?)... as I do.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that some of the websites considered to be the greatest in the world don't work using the most popular browser (IE) with security set at what it should be to reduce the greatest security threats of the internet - no scripting and no ActiveX?
Flash is *horrid*. I tried, I really really tried to be able to deal with it and just gave up, I no longer even load the thing, it is not on this machine. I refuse. If you even have flashblock, you STILL don't know if you want to unblock some site, because you could still get nailed with a machine CPU and RAM eating monstrosity. And forget having multiple tabs open with half of them all loading some flash *thing*. And what about security? Huh?
Just say NO to Flash. If people need to offer a video, there are other ways to go about it without HOSING the innocent. Flash is just rude behavior called "art", it truly sucketh.
about:blank
I can't believe it was nominated for anything but the most pitiful site in the world. Am I the only one when searching for travel info to put -tripadviser in my search. I will just click on google ads in the search results if I just want ads!
Security? Please. Don't let the flash app get me! I lost my life's work due to flash! Flash killed my parents!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I would say, if I had to buy another machine this year, it would be nice to have an architecture that the operating systems of 2009 would run on.
Not that this has anything to do with the parent conversation (that I can ascertain).
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I've installed the Stumble Upon extension for Firefox, and it has worked out to be a great way to find new and different and GOOD things on the web. Lots of eyes with lots of opinions slowly browsing the Web, giving everything thumbs up or thumbs down. If a site floats to the top, it has some real value worth seeing.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com