WEB FEATS
What do Webby Awards 2000 nominees say about the medium's future?

by Jenn Shreve

The nominees for the fourth annual Webby Awards were announced Tuesday morning via email and Web site. That's five lucky Web sites for each of the twenty-seven categories--a grand total of 135 sites.

While winning a Webby Award is hardly as impressive as, say, picking up a National Magazine Award or even an Oscar, it is the highest honor bestowed upon the still-exploding Web industry. You can embrace it as something meaningful, or sneer at it all as an exercise in commercial futility. But if you are at all involved in this business, as I am, you can't ignore it.

Ask anyone who's worked in the Web industry longer than five years to make a prediction about where things are going, and they'll probably say something ambiguous but very true, like: In five more years, the Internet will be unrecognizable from what it is now, just as today it is unrecognizable from what it was five years ago. Almost half a decade old itself, the Webby Awards function as a condensed version of the Web's erratic, mercurial history. (This year, the Webby Awards held its first-ever "Call for Entries," opening the contest to a broader range of possible nominees than in previous years.) Browsing through its past and current categories, nominees and winners, one can chronicle the Web's trends and quirks, its tendencies and abandoned strategies.

New categories are Broadband, Services, Kids, Personal Web Site and Activism. The first two address recent changes on the Web: faster connections mean denser data such as films and music can be transmitted (Broadband); and consumers are increasingly choosing the Web to provide everything from snacks to stamps--through sites like Kozmo.com, that staple of the urban stoner's budget, and Stamps.com --even though they often cost more and going outside can be good for the soul (Services). On the other hand, the inclusion of the Personal Web Site and Activism categories are long overdue. That they are being honored for the first time now is a nod to the fact that though these two types of sites often go unrecognized, they still account for a large percentage of online activity and utility.

Of course, what's missing says a lot as well. Namely, Sex. In 1997, the bathrobe-clad creators of Bianca's Smut Shack accepted the Webby for Sex. The category never appeared again. While Bianca's Shack is smutty only in name (it's one of the oldest online communities), sex--or, more specifically, porn--continues to be the Web's biggest and most profitable business. For crying out loud, porn sites are Web pioneers. Hate or love what they do, they nailed secure commerce transactions, live broadcast with interactive features, and those annoying pop-up windows while everyone else just flailed about. But advertisers and big event sponsors don't want the dirty secret of porn's online success to sully their pristine reputations. I suspect this is why Sex will always be to the Webby Awards what Comedy is to the Oscars.

Some categories and nominees remain year in and year out, bastions of stability in a sea of change. Salon (my former employer), for all its attempts to be seen as a (pick one) Literary Magazine, News Portal, Commerce Site, Media Empire, is still rightly listed in the Print & Zines (formerly Books/Magazines) category, which it's won for the past three years. The Onion, Feed, the Internet Movie Database, and the Wall Street Journal are all worthy repeat nominees. BabyCenter, which took the prize in the Home category in '98 and the Living category in '99, is nominated under Commerce this year, a suitable metaphor for the direction many content sites are heading in.

Some nominees tell us less about the Web itself than the odd and random newsmakers of the past year. For example, Mahir, the briefly ubiquitous "Turkish stud" who wooed cyberspace with his "invitate" to "kiss you," receives a nomination for Weird (doubtless, he'll be treated as a superstar at the event).

There were a few surprises. It was good to see the quirky and independent SportsJones site (a Newcity.com affiliate) nominated alongside big boys like ESPN and FoxSports. DrKoop.com was notably absent from the list of Health nominees, while sex snuck its way onto the nominee list after all: Nerve, which bills itself as "literate smut," is vying for the Print & Zines award. The Music nominees are all download and Real Audio sites, signaling an important shift from label-driven content about music to, well, music (preferably noncommercial and easy to download). Several sites within sites made their way onto the list--including S.F. MOMA's thorough site for last year's astounding Bill Viola exhibit (Arts) and National Geographic's Congo Trek (Broadband). Jodi.org, whose Eurotrashy creators stunned last year's audience with their angry acceptance speech--"Ugly Commercial Sons of Bitches!"--was thankfully not nominated this year. (All Webby Award acceptance speeches are limited to five words.)

Yet for all their breadth and variety, these categories feel oddly antiquated. The story of the Internet has moved beyond mere Web sites. Today it's not what appears in your browser window that's important, but how it got there. The Technical Achievement category recognizes this trend. Yet a host of behind-the-scenes feats continue to be ignored by the Webby Awards. What of Most Impressive Burn Rate? Or, an award for the best-written Business Plan? Best and Worst IPO? And a Lifetime Achievement Award to any dot-com CEO who manages to appear on the covers of Wired, The Industry Standard, Red Herring, Fast Company, Business 2.0 and the Wall Street Journal.

The 4th Annual Webby Awards will be held at the Nob Hill Masonic Center in San Francisco May 11, 2000. A live Webcast of the event will be featured on the Webby site, and Newcity.com will provide extensive coverage.

Jenn Shreve writes about technology, media and popular culture from her home in Oakland, California. She profiled Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain for the U.S. debut of Shift in October 1999.

Editor's note: Newcity.com is a sponsor of the 2000 Webby Awards, but its coverage of the event remains independent of that agreement.