Webby Awards 2007 from Evan Prodromou

Wikitravel won the 2007 Webby Award for Best Travel Website, beating out practically every big player in the Web travel arena. It was a pretty amazing achievement that our community had pulled off, and Maj and I went to New York City to attend the award ceremony and accept the award on behalf of the project.

We stayed at the Doubletree Hotel in the Theater District, but the event itself was way downtown, on Wall Street. We managed to collar a good cab driver, and he got us down to the corner of Broadway and Wall Street in record time.

I went to Wall Street as a kid, and I think I've visited since then, but I haven't been since 9/11. The street is blocked off to all traffic for security reasons, so we had to walk the last few blocks to the event ourselves. Which was OK for me, but Maj had bought some foxy new shoes for the event at the new John Fluevog store in Montreal, so she had a harder time walking.

The site itself was really spectacular. The Museum of American Finance -- formerly Alexander Hamilton's Bank of New York -- is a beautiful building. As we came in the door, we were greeted by at least a dozen ushers -- Welcome to the Webbies! Great first impression!

We got registered fine, but we had some problems making press connections. We'd got some last-minute email to do "red couch" interviews -- special media interviews for the prizewinners. But we couldn't find anyone who knew what we were talking about. We'd had a hard time making press contacts for the event -- our PR group in LA wasn't connected with the PR folks at the Webbies. Which was too bad -- I think it was a missed opportunity.

But we got to spend more time at the opening cocktail that way. Which was great -- they had lots of champagne flowing, and nice hors d'oeuvres. Sure, we weren't there to eat, but it was a nice distraction. We didn't really recognize anyone except Craig Newmark, who we'd spent a nice time with at South by Southwest 2006 and who occupied himself playing with Amita June for more than an hour. But he was surrounded by cameras, so we had to entertain ourselves.

Which turned out fine. Like I said, the bar was great, and since I had dressed like Julian from Trailer Park Boys (at Maj's behest) I had a couple of good rum and Cokes. We wandered over to the big wall to get our official picture taken. Nobody there knew anything about the "red couch" interviews, either. It was kind of frustrating.

As we were standing around, I said out loud, "Well, too bad nobody we know is here." The guys standing next to us said, "What's your site?" "Wikitravel", Maj told them. "Oh, we know that! Great site!" they said. "We're from The Onion." Wow.

So we sat and chatted with the Onion guys for a while, and then the folks from Blip.tv drifted past, and we talked to them, too. Cool. But then it was time to go walk across the street to walk the red carpet up to the event itself. As we were filing out, I struck up a conversation with the guy standing next to me -- one of the editors of The Guardian. Cool, times two.

The red carpet was really crowded, but it gave us a chance to catch up with Allen Mendelsohn from Plank Design who we'd met at South by Southwest 2007. Plank was the Webby Ambassador for Canada this year -- responsible for letting the country know about the Webbies, and letting the Webbies know about great Canadian sites. I think they did a good job.

As we were going in, we passed a cluster of media around three guys -- one in a porkpie hat, another with a cheap fright wig on. Oh, hey -- that's the Beastie Boys. Neat.

The venue for the main event was even more impressive than the Museum. Cipriani is a full city block in size, in the former New York Merchant Exchange building, and makes quite an impression. On the downside, we got shunted waaaaaaaaay off to the right of the stage -- so far away, we couldn't see it at all, and had to watch the event mostly on the monitors stationed around the hall. On the plus side, we were right next to the bar. So good for us.

Our table turned out to be really great. The guys from Save the Internet were there, which was fun. "I just had coffee with Tim Wu!" I told them. Heh! The folks from probono.net, from AIDS activists World Vision, and the people from Cabengo who designed the mind-boggling Smithsonian Photography Initiative. Sense a pattern? I think we were assigned to the Crusaders table.

The awards ceremony

In a few minutes, the lights dimmed and we got a humourous introductory film on the screens. It had swelling music, and interviews with unknown people, making crazy claims about the Internet. It ended with a woman saying, "And now, I have to go watch a monkey pee into his own mouth." Ha ha.

The idea that the Web was just about video sharing -- trivial video sharing -- was a meme that came up a few times. During intermissions, we got some "best of Youtube" clips, which were pretty funny, but seeing something like Dick in a Box was kind of a disappointment. What does a sketch copied from Saturday Night Live have to do with the Web, and the work that all the award winners were doing?

There was also a strong theme of trivialization that also bothered me. Sure, making fun of pontificating digerati is a time-honored tradition on the Web, but isn't an awards ceremony the time to celebrate those far-flung claims -- and boggle at how far we've come? Instead, I got a sense that the people working on the Webbies don't really like the Web and wanted to take the air out of it. If I had to guess, I'd think they were mostly from a background in TV and the movies.

Then we got an intro from the current head of the IADAS, David-Michel Davies. DMD thanked his sponsors, and I was impressed by the array of sponsorship levels: Title Sponsors, Lead Event Sponsors, Founding Mobile Sponsor and Official Vodka Sponsor.

I was a little bummed not to see Tiffany Shlain on stage, but from what I gather she's no longer working on the Webbies. Which is a real bummer -- her participation is a continuous thread that has made this set of awards really interesting. Our phone calls went to some company in Kansas called "The Awards Company" -- I'd love to find out more about what's going on with these awards behind the scenes.

Then Rob Corddry came out for a warm-up monologue. Corddry is the bald guy from The Daily Show. He was funny enough, but he didn't know much about the Web -- about developing, building and promoting Web sites, about movements in the Web world, about much of anything. He started off the event with a series of jokes pretending not to know anything about the Web, and it dragged on faaar too long. It only served to underline the fact that he really didn't know what he was talking about.

When you have an awards event that celebrates a culture, it's good to connect with and invigorate that culture. It would have been cool to have had someone who could make a joke about RoR, or the difference between MySpace and Facebook, or bugs in Basecamp. There are a lot of funny, interesting people who could do this job, and Rob Corddry just isn't one of them.

He also had a real pottymouth. I'm no prude, but a continuous stream of "fucking " and "shit" and etc. sets a certain mood. His opening monologue: "Anyone else wash their balls with peppermint shampoo?" I know that we're the Web, so we're different and cool and less stodgy than other media, but the tone was such that the ceremony felt less formal, important and -- I dunno -- ceremonial. An MC's job is to crack jokes, but maybe something more wry and clever along the lines of Johnny Carson rather than outrageous like Chris Rock would give a better feel.

Then they explained how the awards would work. They'd be calling up the winners in the 69 different categories in groups of 20 or so, loosely based on themes, and they'd wait in the silhouette box to come out. There would be one person allowed on stage per winning site, and they'd get to say their thanks, and walk off the stage. (The Webbies are famous for their limit on speech length: only five words.) We wouldn't get our actual trophies, but there was a sample one we could hold for the cameras.

And we went right into the awards process. It was great seeing so many people get awards for great work on the Web. But the process was kind of minimalizing. Winners got less that 30 seconds on stage, total, and were pushed through as fast as possible. Admittedly, this kept the ceremony from dragging on all night, but at the same time we didn't get a chance to linger over the winners' achievements. It would have been great to have screen-shots of the winners sites on the overhead screens (say), and to have the MC read a one-sentence description of the winners' sites. Instead, we got a contextless series, optimized for cattle-car throughput.

There were a lot of clever speeches. I liked Nick.com's "Have sex, make more kids" and the New York Times's "All the news that's fit [...]". Some were serious, like the BBC's "Alan, we're thinking of you." (Referring to kidnapped journalist Alan Johnston.) And World Vision pointed out, "Fifteen million AIDS orphans. Help." Heavy. Probably my favourite was The Onion -- who completely ignored the five-word rule and started an Oscars-style speech ("I want to thank Mom and Dad... Thanks to all the little people... Thanks of course to God.") He got booed off the stage -- hilarious.

Just as the announcements were starting to run together, we had the first special award: Artists of the Year to the Beastie Boys. They came up and wisecracked about the Web and their computers -- they didn't seem to really know where they were. Their achievement: the movie Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!, which "anticipated the YouTube revolution".

This was another thing that kind of bothered me. Sure, having the Beastie Boys and David Bowie at the ceremony generated a lot of buzz and made it a real media event. But these made-up awards for people who are only very, very tenuously connected to the Web kind of made the real awards a little less important. eBay and YouTube had real achievements and innovations to celebrate; it's hard to compare Bowiebanc and the Grand Royal forums.

Wikitravel win

After a break and some nice dinner -- with lots of wine -- the events started up again. It wasn't too long before our category, "Services", was announced. The intro film, to call us up to the stage? A cartoon of a street-walking prostitute getting picked up by a john in a car. Get it? "Services". Gee, thanks.

I went up to get our award, and I was pretty nervous. We'd had a little discussion on Wikitravel to decide what the speech should be -- why shouldn't that part be wiki-edited too, after all? Maj was too far away to get a good shot, but you can see me in the official Webbys shot, as I delivered the five-word speech: No longer a lonely planet. Some people laughed, and I actually got one or two boos. Well, that's that, I guess.

And before I knew it, the event was almost over. David Bowie came up to get his award. I'd like to say that I didn't enjoy it, but his speech was one of the best of the night: I only get five words? Shit, that was five. Four more there. That's three. Two. [Pause]. Saying "I just said one word" with zero words is hard to do, but he delivered. Then, he booked off the stage.

After the event, we filed outside to go to the afterparty. The guys from Eepy Bird were there with a huge set-up of Diet Coke and Mentos. "When is this going to go off?" I asked. "We just finished," the Eepy Bird guy told me. "Was it good?" "Yeah, it was pretty good." "OK, then."

The afterparty was at the Hiro Ballroom of the Maritime Hotel, which was a beautiful 30s-era Far-Eastern speakeasy. The place was packed, and the music was really loud -- it was hard to catch up with people there. DJ Jazzy Jeff was the DJ, but we didn't have a lot of energy for the music.

We hung out with Allen some more, and talked to the award-taker from Trip Advisor. But as we hit the midnight hour, we had to get back home to Amita June at the hotel, so we got in a cab and had a tired ride uptown.

Conclusions

My take-away from the Webbies? I really loved being there to meet people. It was a stretch out of my usual Open Source/Open Content/Web 2.0 crowd that we meet at conferences we usually go to, to meet some people we otherwise wouldn't run into.

And I think it was incredible to have the work of the tens of thousands of Wikitravellers who've made WT into a world-class travel guide recognized as the best, over such an illustrious field of competitors. That was really great.

But I think the ceremony itself needs to take the winners themselves, and the work they've done, a little more seriously. Our work is more than uploading pictures of our asses to YouTube, and it deserves a little more respect. As the Web's finishing up its second decade, it's impressive to look back on the achievements of so many of these people.

The Webbies has become the definitive award for achievement on the Web, and that's something to be proud of. But I think there's still a lot of work to be done to honour the efforts of Web designers, innovators and developers.

tags: webbys webby awards wikitravel ceremony newyorkcity