Worth1000 is a community of mostly Photoshop users who use their skills to manipulate images for the respect of others, and possibly get cash prizes along the way. The site's been around since 2002 and has an avid, active user base of technology aficionados and people whom like creating and looking at well-done "photoshopping."
What makes the service especially great is the design. Each contest is set up like a forum thread. You can casually browse hundreds of photos in a sitting. In addition to photos, there are also contests for multimedia, and text writing that follows a similar format.
Worth1000 comes from the same folks who created Aviary, a small suite of Web applications for Web design and photo, audio, and video editing.
Winner: Worth 1000 (Worth1000)
Category: Publishing
WordPress is a free blogging platform available to everyone. WordPress has two components, one is a free, Web-based blog-hosting service called WordPress.com. The other is WordPress.org, which provides users with software to run a more feature-rich version of the blogging tool on their own servers.
Both services offer a very easy way to blog, with administrative options to work collaboratively on one or several blogs using the same log-in. Bloggers can write their posts in a WYSIWYG editor, or switch over to a code view on the fly.
The service is best known for its community-created themes and plug-ins. A blog owner running WordPress on his or her own server can download these and deploy changes to the blog site instantly. WordPress.com users are limited to a smaller selection of these themes and features that come from the plug-ins, although many neat and useful Wordpress.org features make their way over to Wordpress.com just a few months after being released.
Winner: WordPress (WordPress.com)
Category: Publishing
Twitter is an online service that lets you broadcast short messages to your friends or "followers." It also lets you specify which Twitter users you want to follow so you can read their messages in one place.
Twitter is designed to work on a mobile phone as well as on a computer. All Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, so each message can be sent as a single SMS alert. You can't say much in 140 characters. That is part of Twitter's charm.
In 2007 Twitter didn't come out with as many new features as much as other developers found way to use the open data API to create their own specialized applications. The result is a wealth of tools and services that take Twitter beyond its original intention, and make it something bigger.
Winner: Twitter (Twitter.com)
Category: Publishing
Picasa Web Albums is Google's Web photo hosting service. Users get 1GB of free hosting, and images can be uploaded and manipulated using Picasa, Google's free desktop photo management application. Users who want additional storage can shell out up to $500 a year to bump up the hosted space to 400 times the size of the free hosting service.
We really like the integration between the desktop and Web application. Like .Mac and iPhoto, Picasa makes it really simple to take photos from your desktop and publish them online for others to see. We're also fans of the built-in geotagging that lets you set where photos were taken either by single photo, or by entire albums. It's a great way to browse photos if you feel like exploring.
Winner: Picasa Web Albums (Picasaweb.Google.com)
Category: Publishing
Photobucket is a photo-sharing and hosting site owned by News Corp. In addition to photo hosting, Photobucket lets its users upload video clips, which can be edited with an integrated video remixing tool designed by Adobe. Users also can make their own profiles and portfolios to share with others.
The service hosts nearly three billion user photos and is one of the most-trafficked photo services on the Internet. This year Photobucket integrated fellow 2008 Webware 100 winner Photoflexer as the built-in editing tool, and added a great new feature that lets you tag people in photos, and browse Photobucket photos on your TiVo.
Winner: Photobucket (Photobucket.com)
Category: Publishing
FotoFlexer is a free Web based photo editor that offers one-click tweaks, and some advanced tools on par with desktop class photo editing software. Users can edit photos with a simple graphical interface, and pull in photos from all over the Web, including popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Once you've found a photo you want to "flex," the application will jump you out to a full-screen editing canvas, where you have quick tabbed controls for all the usual editing goodies such as rotation, a cropping tool, and a resizer. You'll also find some fun distortion effects similar to the liquefy tool in Photoshop.
The tool's real power, however, is it's predictive pixel partitioning technology, which will let you do things like cut out certain elements of a photo without having to move your mouse over the entire outline of what's in the shot. This same technology is used for some other features that set it apart from the rest.
Winner: FotoFlexer (FotoFlexer.com)
Category: Publishing
Flickr is a popular photo-sharing and hosting service owned by Yahoo. It supports an active and engaged community where people share and explore each other's photos. You can share and host hundreds of your own pictures on Flickr without paying a dime. There's also a pro service that gets you unlimited storage and sharing for about $2 a month.
Besides sharing your photos, Flickr has recently added support for videos. Unlike other sharing sites though, users videos are capped to about a minute which the creators hope will create a whole new genre of videography that's a little more like a long-form photo.
Both photos and videos can be accessed in Flickr's API, which has led to some interesting third-party mash-ups. It's also made for some neat ways to integrate Flickr shots into blogs and social-networking profiles.
Winner: Flickr (Flickr.com)
Category: Publishing
Drupal is a powerful publishing and content management system. Users can add all sorts of content to Web pages through a system of modules. The software itself is free and open-source; users need simply pick out which site elements they want, and then put them together.
Drupal has been used on several popular and professional sites. One of the most notable is The Onion, the satirical news publication, as well as MTV's Web site in the United Kingdom. In its latest iteration, version 6, it has added support for drag-and-drop, OpenID logins, and an editor that can be tuned to suit both left, and right viewing cultures.
Winner: Drupal (Drupal.org)
Category: Publishing
Blogger is a Web-based blogging platform owned by Google. Users can create and customize their own blogs using a drag-and-drop editor, and have them hosted for free on Google's massive server arrays. The service offers many ways for bloggers to tailor the user experience, from changeable themes to a custom domain name. Blogger also enables blog owners to add collaborators and other administrators to help them write or manage user comments.
Google has integrated Blogger into a number of services, including the Google browser toolbar. Users of the toolbar who come across something interesting can click a special button that will grab the page information and put it into a new post. There's also a plug-in for Microsoft Word to do the same thing with any document.
Winner: Blogger (Blogger.com)
Category: Publishing
Apple's .Mac service is a yearly subscription-based suite of Web and software services for Mac users. Subscribers get 10GB of online storage, e-mail address, and a Web-based e-mail client. They can also publish their own blog, which can be edited and managed using Apple's iWeb software.
Users of .Mac can build public or private meeting pages using the groups service. Each group gets its own shared file storage, calendar, e-mail, and message board. There's also a feature called "Back to My Mac" which will let you access files on multiple networked computers.
Winner: .Mac (Apple.com/DotMac)
Category: Publishing
