[chapter-delegates] Webby Awards last night -- magnificent view of what's happening

[Gene Gaines]

If you want to see what is new and fresh and important
in terms of Internet content, one of the best places to
spend some time is: www.webbyawards.com. (Yes, I know,
very English language and U.S. centric.)

The annual Webby Award banquet was held in New York
City last evening.

To me, the most important part of the event was the
Webby Lifetime Achievement Award presented to Al Gore.

Mr. Gore, during the time he was a U.S. Senator, was one
of the first national elected officials who really "got it"
as far as the ARPANET and the potential of what it could
become.  He and his senate staff worked diligently to
pass necessary legislation, make funds available, and
pushed a number of U.S. government agencies to do pieces
of the work necessary to get the new "open" IP network in
operation.  For this, when he ran for Vice President for
President, his political enemies twisted his words to
unfairly ridicule the good work he had done.

It put things right, at least a bit, to have the Webby
Lifetime Achievement Award given to Al. Gore.  I was
pleased that Vint Cerf presented the award to Mr. Gore.

I'll quote the New York Times article on the Webby
Awards banquet last night.

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 
Five Words of Wisdom Each From the Web's Winning Sites

By DAVID CARR
June 7, 2005
New York Times

One of the more charming idiosyncrasies of the Webby Awards, the
annual awards for achievement in Web creation, is that
recipients get five words, and five words only, to make their
acceptance speeches.

So after a night full of award innuendos and one-line haiku at
Gotham Hall in Manhattan, the 550 people in attendance were
wondering how Al Gore, the former vice president, would respond
to his lifetime achievement award.

He did not disappoint.

"Please don't recount this vote," he said. The place went nuts.

Mr. Gore, who was politically savaged during the 2000
presidential campaign for a remark that seemed to imply that he
had created the Internet, was introduced by Vinton Cerf, a man
who has a more legitimate purchase on that claim. Mr. Cerf, one
of the scientists credited with having built the Internet, had
his own five-word speech - "We all invented the Internet" -
before pointing out that Mr. Gore had been responsible for
spearheading critical legislation and providing much-needed
political support, which is not exactly creating a paradigm
shifting piece of technology, but is not bad for a politician.

Mr. Gore, by virtue of his résumé, was dragged back to the dais
to say a few more words.

"It is time to reinvent the Internet for all of us to make it
more robust and much more accessible and use it to reinvigorate
our democracy," he said, again to thunderous applause.

It was an awards banquet where hype and self-congratulation were
mixed with bracing messages about the cultural and civic good
that can come from the Internet. Once a raucous celebration of
the World Wide Web's potential to change everything, the awards
slimmed down along with the digital economy after the bust,
forgoing a huge party for an online event in the last two years.
But the Web is no longer a bad word among business people, and
it has left the hermetic, homey confines of San Francisco for
New York, the first time in its nine-year history.

The decision to present the awards in New York is less a
recognition of the city's growing role in digital culture than
its longer-running one as the media capital of the Western
hemisphere. It is also an indication that the Web does not live
exclusively in Silicon Valley; its ubiquity has rendered it
transparent and free-floating.

"Every year we have done something different to reflect the
pulse of the Web, and tonight we are in New York because the Web
has been dispersed," said Tiffany Shlain, one of the founders of
the ceremony. "Great Web sites are being created and accessed
everywhere."

Including Amarillo, Tex. Tyler Morgan, 19, was getting all of a
dozen hits a day on the personal Web site he built in his
bedroom - Rtm86.com - until Yahoo named it as a site of the day
and he was listed as a nominee for the Webby. In May he had 1.2
million hits.

After he learned he had won the Webby, there was the problem of
getting to New York.

"I put a personal plea on my Web site, and people sent in
something like $1,700 and here I am," he said, wearing one of
the red corsages that identified the winners. His five-word
speech was to the point: "Desperate - need money for college."

Mr. Morgan took his place in a line that included the likes of
Pfizer, the C.I.A. and Geico Insurance, but also The Paly Voice,
the Web site of Palo Alto High School, and RatherGood, a
compendium of weirdly wonderful things. The broad range of
winners was a reminder of the Web's fungibility, an elastic
nature that allows the medium to trumpet mass and granular
manifestations of what people are thinking about.

Because the Webby sculpture is shaped like a large spring, it
invited short-form, salacious annotations, with many speeches
that drew hoots from the crowd but might draw flags from the
editor of a family newspaper. One of the more demure, low-tech
speeches came from a staff member at Vogue.com.uk, who stepped
up to get her award in a gorgeous white frock.

"Do you like my dress?" she said. Yes, they did, and her speech
as well.

The event was businesslike, as businesslike as an awards
ceremony whose central icon is a cartoonishly large spring can
be. The host was Ron Corddry, one of the funny guys on "The
Daily Show With Jon Stewart," who brought an air of knowing
befuddlement to the events at hand.

To the extent that any awards serve as a mood ring on the
industry they celebrate - not all that farfetched, if you
deconstruct the average year for the Tonys and the Oscars - the
Web has become a sandbox where anarchy and commerce have
business in common. While these may not be the heady, freaky
days of 2000 and 2001, when old-media luminaries presented
awards and thousands of people fought for tickets, the Web is
still making noise after the boom.

The Webby for Person of the Year went to Craig Newmark of
craigslist.org, whose once-tiny community bulletin board now
attracts more than eight million people in 120 cities, including
Sydney, Australia, and Bangalore, India. Mr. Newmark's various
sites have given fits to the classified ad business of both
daily and weekly papers.

Innovators in both music and images, two hot buttons of Internet
culture, were cited as well. The Kleptones, a band from Britain,
received an award for their music site, which uses the music of
others, most recently Freddy Mercury of Queen, to mash together
new versions of old motifs. The band's "Night at the Hip-Hopera"
became a viral sensation after they plopped it out on the Web
for mashing and downloading. And Flickr.com, a photo management
site that uses elements of community and Web "tagging" and RSS
feeds, made a trip to the podium to be honored for its
groundbreaking approach to image sharing.

Whimsy always gets a front-row seat at the Webby's, and this
year Dogster.com , a San Francisco Web site, picked up the
community award for its creation of a virtual dog run for pets
and their owners. BoingBoing.net, whose idiosyncratic approach
to what constitutes information worth sharing - robot bands,
charts on disappearing oil, or an Osama Bin Laden cigarette
lighter replete with World Trade Center towers - received top
blogging honors.

As was only fitting, there was a significant populist element to
the awards, with 200,000 people voting for "The People's Voice
Award," one of more than 60 categories in the program, which
drew entries from all 50 states and 40 countries. Comedy
Central's "Indecision 2004" on "The Daily show," won both a
Webby and the People's Voice Award.

(A complete list of the winners is at www.webbyawards.com .)

The Webbys got off to a wobbly but impressive start in 1997. Ms.
Shlain, an independent filmmaker and designer who was then
designing the Web site for a print magazine called The Web put
out by IDG, cobbled $30,000 and in-kind donations from 11
companies to gin up the first annual awards, which drew 700
people to Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco. Willie Brown, then
the city's mayor, was at the event, which was sponsored by The
Web. The following year, the company closed down The Web, but
the Webby Awards lived on, with the second show featuring the
likes of Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip "Dilbert,"
and the well-known Web savant Dennis Rodman - well, he was well
known, anyway. The show, feeding off the growing hype
surrounding the Web, attracted significant media attention, and
Rudolph Giuliani, then mayor of New York City, made an offer in
1998 to bring the Webbys to Radio City Music Hall. Mayor Brown
countered and the awards stayed on the West Coast, but this year
the Webby Awards decided to come east.

Also in 1998, Ms. Shlain and a partner, Maya Draisin, helped
form the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences to
oversee the awards, enrolling luminaries like the rock star
David Bowie, the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and the digital
thinker Esther Dyson, and securing PricewaterhouseCoopers to
oversee the judging process. After the crash, the Webbys were
strictly a virtual event, with live Webcasts in 2003 and 2004,
but they have since returned to an awards show format, always
featuring the now-trademark short acceptance speech. The winning
winner on Monday night? It may have been the man from
LonelyPlanet.com, the People's Voice winner in the travel
category:

"Love your country. Leave it."




Gene Gaines
Sterling, Virginia USA