The Webbys – A Trip Back In Time

Nik’s written a piece on why he likes the Webbys over here.

I like the Webbys too. For me they’re the awards that get closest to recognising the important things online (in the English speaking parts of the interwebs anyway). It tends to recognise things for what they are, not what they look like.

Anyway, inspired by Nik’s runthrough of winners I went back and had a a look at 1997’s winners (Webbys 1.0) and I was totally shocked when I started to try and visit them.

It felt like most of them had gone!!!

So I did a very quick lookup of what’s left in all of the categories and it’s as follows:

I started to draw all kinds of spurious conclusions about why Money, Science, Film and Health are all still there (because they’re connected to big money and/or boffins). And why music, politics and sport did the worst (because they’re fickle, fast-moving industries run by a bunch of charlatans). But then I realised I was talking nonsense. There’s all kinds of reasons why these sites have gone missing in action.

For me it’s a really big shame that 47% of the best websites in the world from 10 years ago aren’t there any more. Thank goodness for the Wayback machine and its ability to teleport us back in time (mostly)…

Here’s the ones that are still alive…

(The ones that I’ve marked with a * are the ones that I love because the sites still really smell of 1997. The ones with two ** are the ones that make me really nostalgic for the days that I could do web design. The rest of them feel like they’ve moved on a bit…)

Art

http://www.entropy8.com/
* http://www.adaweb.com/

Books and Magazines

http://www.salon.com
* http://www.desires.com
* http://www.suck.com/

Broadband

http://radio3.cbc.ca/

Games

http://www.gamespot.com

Home

** http://www.toiletology.com/
http://info.eb.com/

Health

http://www.acupuncture.com/
http://www.planetout.com/
http://www.reutershealth.com/
http://www.prevention.com

Money

http://www.adbusters.org
http://www.cnnfn.com
http://www.edmunds.com
http://www.pathfinder.com/fortune
http://www.fool.com

Film

http://www.eonline.com
http://www.film.com
http://www.imdb.com
http://www.mrshowbiz.com

Music

http://www.musiccentral.msn.com
http://www.sonicnet.com (sort of works, but not really)

Politics

http://www.disinfo.com

Science

** http://spirit.lib.uconn.edu/archnet
http://www.sciam.com
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu
http://www.discovery.com
http://www.exploratorium.edu

Sport(s)
http://www.skinet.com

Television

http://www.edrive.com
http://www.pbs.org
http://www.ultimatetv.com/

Travel

* http://route66.netvision.be
http://www.travelocity.com
** http://www.travlang.com

Weird

** http://www.panix.com/~clocke/EGR
http://www.theonion.com

So if you’ve made a nice website or know someone that has, enter The Webbys (closing date for this year is 25th Jan). And keep your website alive. Forever.