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.
WEIRD |
| Ad Nauseum | We could go on and on about Ad Nauseam: Jim Nelson's got so much stuff filling up his head, he had to put it somewhere, and Ad Nauseam is the result. "Verbage" and "Minutia" (that's how he spells 'em) contain his musings on media, technology, and the peculiar phenomenon that is Fry's electronic superstore; "Lists" offers everything from "Trendy drinks now served at Silicon Valley bars" to "Newsgroups that need to be destroyed." Nelson opines and inveighs ad infinitum-until he can't take it no more: "I can't believe I'm still sitting here writing this. My butt's fallen to sleep." |
WINNER |
Exquisitely dense, giddily funny, and studded with more than a chain gang, this site is crammed with pop culture ephemera like the Arch Deluxe Hate Page and a tribute to the Annoying J. Crew Model of the Week. A curiosity shop filled with a seemingly limitless supply of photos, stories, and found humor. |
| Fetish | Who needs Rube Goldberg? Fetish (not to be confused with Wired's column of the same name) is the product of two gaijin architects in Japan. They've collected some of the inimitably wacky Japanese inventions-including a gum-scraping machine, a discreet "earlarm" for portable wakeup calls, and ion-charged toothbrushes to zap away garlic breath-that they claim have inspired their design work. Best of all, many of the products can be ordered through the page. Kind of like an online Sharper Image, with even more profoundly useless stuff. |
| Entropy Gradient Reversals | The front-page announcement, "Our Goal: 2,000,000 Readers and a Fat IPO Within 14 Months," is followed immediately by "Our Current Subscriber Base: 291." Entropy may boast the most self-effacing bravado on the Web. Created and maintained by Christopher Locke, one of the few people who's ever worked for IBM and kept a sense of humor, Entropy is a mishmash of rants, articles, and links-crabby, but in a cheery way. Check out the psychic service, which tests your personality by querying, "You're not one of those weirdos, are you?" |
| The Onion | This online version of the Wisconsin-based publication offers tabloid-style faux journalism--"Special Olympics fixed! Perky 'Canada' has own government, laws!" In an editorial, a horn-hatted Viking declares that kids now are soft: In his day, "We wore hair shirts that ripped our flesh even as we drank our mead." You also get comics, weather, and Dan Savage's advice column. Much like a real newspaper, just slightly more ridiculous. |