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The one thing the world needed was another award show. Welcome to the Webby Awards. Actually, the Webby Awards aren't TV show at all (at least not yet, due to the five word acceptance speech limit). The Webby Awards is a web site dedicated to the "Best of the Web". The 5th annual Webby Awards recently took place over the summer, with winners from a diverse group of categories. The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences selectively choose the winners and nominees. This distinguished group works in conjunction with the San Francisco Museum of Art and also allows the people of the web to pick their own winners from the nominees via the Peoples Voice Awards in each of the internet categories. So let the ceremony begin.
Nobody should criticize this award show any more than any of the others out there. After all, at least the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences are putting forth a productive effort, and at least they are committed to finding the best. It is difficult to not look at every new award show, without a little sarcasm and skepticism. There are so many semi-serious award shows out there, from the Tony's to the Emmy's, most of which deserve thumbs down; way down. The Grammy's in particular are the music industries annual festival in bad taste and over production. But enough skepticism, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences are the experts in their field, they deserve our ear. The message was that all good web sites have things in common, like easy to use layout, and original graphics, yet at the same time they are very creative in their own way.
Now if you are a first time viewer of Webby Awards, one of the first things to jump out is the number of categories. Lined along the right side of the page are thirty or so categories. The categories cover a wide range of topics, including a "weird" category and a "print +zines" category. The numerous categories made it difficult to decide which category of awards deserved a closer look. Three categories out of the thirty seemed to be of immediate interest. They were Sports, Games, and Weird. The Sports category was a natural place to start. The winners were arranged by year, and looking at current and past winners was easy.
Here is a look at the Sports Award History: In 1997, www.espn.com swept the Webby Award and the People's Voice Award. The site swept both awards again in 2000 and was a People's Choice Award winner in 1998 and 2001. Perhaps these Webby Awards do have some merit. Anyone giving awards to Espn.com knows good metaforms. Good metaforms are exactly what these awards are all about. In 1998, 1999 and 2001 Espn.com lost. The 1998 winner, cbssportsline.com, and the 2001 winner, Swell.com, were very respectable metaforms. The designers of these two sites definitely put some thought into them. In 1999, the Academy must have been bribed.
Espn.com deserved the award in this year, but Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences went a tad bit crazy and picked a loser. The esteemed Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences choose www.Sportspages.com. Sportspages.com is basically a yahoo.com affiliate, which gives news on sports in the form of articles. This site has no pictures, and no video. Actually the site does have pictures, but they are all for adds and not content related. It was simply a bad pick.
The respectable Sports Webby Award winners included a website dedicated to surfing. It was organized in a smooth clean layout, that was well organized, and deserving of beating the two-time champ Espn.com. Swell.com and many of the past sports winners have a lot in common. Most of the sites have their own graphics and logos, made from a quality blend of shapes, letters and colors. Past winners, have a convenient layout with subsections linked on the side of the page. Many of the winners had very similar layouts in fact, using frames and hypertext in the same manner. All the winners, with the above exception of Sportspages.com, also had pictures.
The best of the winners included video and audio links in their site so that interested parties could be informed and entertained by multimedia. The main characteristic that bonded all the sports category winners was the high volume of content. Every winner had tons of information, with closer looks at such things as players' stats and recent injury news. Deciding on how to display that information is what set them apart from each other. Each site had its own style to it. Cbssportsline.com was original in providing a scroll bar with recent scores on the left hand side of the page. Espn.com uses their left side to display links to the different sub-divisions, each with the name of a sports league. To be individual on the web you have to have style and be original.
In other categories, like the Games category, the winners had a subtle different look from the sports winners. These sites tended to be more entertaining. The sites had extensive use of flash and multimedia to go along with detailed drawings or pictures. Their pages seemed like movie shorts or cartoons as much as they seemed like videogame adds. Every game winner had the use of flash somewhere included in the site. Sometimes flash was used to display a storyline, other times it showed sample scenes from games. Any website including a jumping Tamale Loco and a wiggling Difu deserves recognition. Overall the Game Webby Award winners were very impressive. Some of the Game web site winners were as entertaining as Espn.com.
Then there was the Weird Category. "Weird" was a good name for it. The 2001 winner was The Home Page for Peter Pan, www.pixyland.org/peterpan. This site was one of those things in life where you just open your eyes a little wider in disbelief. The page's creator, Randy Constan, a 47-year-old computer programmer, dedicated his web space to the pride of Pixyland. Anyone who views this site will not think of Peter Pan in the same way as they did when they were 5. Besides the disturbing pictures, the site was very well structured. The green background and music went with the Peter Pan motif and this page was also laid out in an informative and easy to navigate format.
If the Weird Category wasn't weird enough, the 2000 winner was a porn site, www.stileproject.com. Any group of people who would intentionally have Peter Pan square off against Porn have issues. In their defense the category was called "weird" and the porn site was as logically organized as the Peter Pan site. But still, the combination of Peter Pan and Porn somehow seems wrong. The web went far to connect the uncommon motifs in this category.
From a careful examination of the Sports, Games, and Weird Webby award winners, it can be determined that many of these Webby winners have glaring similarities. At the same time the winners are very different from each other and the other pages out there on the web. Each site's creators chose which HTML tools and tags they were going to showcase on their site to make it stand out. But at the same time those creators also tried to provide commonality and work toward convenience of navigation so that everyone can use their sites. There is a convergence of form among the different sites, whether the site is about PeterPan, Porn, or the shorebreak at Waimea Bay. Good sites have straightforward organization, high content, and detailed graphics, all mixed into a final product.
The Webby Awards web site itself is a metaform and a qualifying website for judge. In 2002, the Webby Awards should nominate itself. It has all the characteristics and superficial qualities of a site deserving an award. Imagine the repercussions. The Webby Awards could trailblaze a new frontier in which Award Shows could be nominated and give themselves awards. Or maybe the Webby Awards are just another Internet filter like any other web site. The Webby Awards are a good metaform, but not as good as the greatest site on earth, Espn.com, the one and only.
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