The Best Of The WebThe Best Of The Web
Awards time is here. No, it's not the "Oscar" , "Grammy" or the "Emmy" awards. It's the awards for the World Wide Web where they choose the 'best of the best' of the Internet. It's the "Webby Awards". And here are the nominees and winners which are catogarized into 15 categories.
TRAVEL |
| Travelocity | "Maximum power for the do-it-yourself traveler," is the slogan, and dang if they don't deliver. Find the lowest air fare to your destination and book your tickets, reserve a rental car to be waiting for you when you get there, and book a room in one of 32,000 hotels. You also get restaurant reviews, sightseeing hints, and cultural listings for hundreds of destinations all over the globe, newsgroup-style bulletin boards for sharing travel tips, and an online mall selling all sorts of travel tchotchkes, all connected by a ridiculously easy-to-use interface_in other words, like the slogan says. |
| The Rough Guide USA | Rough Guides are among the most thorough and useful guidebooks around. A joint project with hotWired, this site offers the entire text of the mammoth USA book. The interface is attractively designed and easy to navigate, and readers can post their experiences of travel hell and heaven. Of course, relying on the Web version of this resource is a lot more trouble (and a lot less handy) than just buying the book. But then (duh) that's probably the idea. |
WINNER |
n the finest British tradition-pithy, pissy, and bang on-Travelmag warns those likely to get a burr in their fur from its forthright style that "litigants should bear in mind we have no assets." And as the site's hosts explain in their astute Web review section, "Your site might not be listed here because we think it's boring." Refreshingly opinionated travel articles and regular features like Health Check, Crime of the Month, and reviews of guidebooks. Travelmag encourages contributions: See the world and vent your spleen. |
| Route 66 | Go ahead and get your kicks. More than half a dozen major sites are devoted to this near-mythical highway, and even more offer material related to the Mother Road. Strangely, the best of the bunch was created by one Swa Frantzen of Belgium. Voluminous, well-organized information and a definitive list of make these pages the place to stop before you hit the road. |
| Travlang | Most folks come here for the Foreign Languages for Travelers section: Pick the language you want to learn_anything from the standard Europeans to the non-standard (a little Icelandic, anyone?) to the non-European and get a quick rundown (with sound bites) of the common phrases phrases travelers need to get by. Sure, you could pick nits about the choice of languages (why Icelandic but not Vietnamese?) but that would be nit-picking. But there's more than language instruction here. You also get a database of hotels worldwide, currency converters, and links to travel resources all over the Web. As they say in Tagalog, "Nasaan ang kasilyas?" |