Immediately following the Friday night broadcast of MTVU's alternative-music awards show, the Woodie Awards, viewers will be able to watch a 360-degree video of it online.
The Immersive Media technology supporting the online video, scheduled for online availability at 8 p.m. PST, is designed to enable users to freely navigate around a video, 360 degrees, letting them explore angles and shots that they wouldn't normally have been able to see.
While I haven't seen the Woodie feed yet, I did have a chance to play around with the technology on some test videos. The video experience seems perfectly suited for a concert format. It's certainly something worth checking out, even if you don't particularly care for the music, which is scheduled to include performances by Death Cab for Cutie, The Dead Weather, Matt and Kim, and Passion Pit.
This is the first big event for the IM Live technology, so it should be interesting to see how the experience of the fully produced show on TV compares to the IM Live video experience, in which site visitors essentially become their own producers. If you end up making your own comparisons, let us know what you think.
There are literally dozens of categories in the annual Webby Awards--too many, if you ask some--covering pretty much every niche of digital media. This year's winners, announced Tuesday, are quite a lot to scroll through.
The list of top honors, however, is short.
This year, the Webby Awards' Person of the Year is former "Saturday Night Life" cast member Jimmy Fallon, whose new "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" has brought Twittering and gadget fandom to the network-TV crowd.
The film-specific Person of the Year award goes to "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane, who has partnered with Google on an animated Web series and whose creations consistently rank at the top of Hulu's most-watched clips.
The Artist of the Year accolade is for Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor. A vocal critic of the mainstream music industry, Reznor has been skeptical of "innovative" digital distribution efforts and most recently lashed out at Apple on his blog for turning down a Nine Inch Nails iPhone app.
A new category, Breakout of the Year, joins the Webbys this year. It's been awarded to--surprise, surprise--Twitter.
The fact that the Webbys' top awards go to known entities isn't new. Its highest honors tend to go to mainstream celebrities who have built their fame offline and have then turned to the Web as a sort of experimental platform. Last year's Person of the Year awards, for example, went to comedian Stephen Colbert, director Michel Gondry, and Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am for his YouTube sensation "Yes We Can" in support of Barack Obama's presidential campaign.
The Webbys ceremony is set for June 8 as part of Internet Week New York.
The nominations for the Webby Awards, that annual extravaganza of accolades for just about anything connected to the Internet, have been announced. Leading the pack of nominees for the 13th annual Webbys are The New York Times' nytimes.com with 13 nominations, NBC.com with 12, and The Onion with 8. There are, in case you were counting, two nominations for Fail Blog.
There are also plenty of video productions nominated, like FunnyorDie.com's "Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Ad" and "Children's Hospital," the comedy series on TheWB.com starring "The Daily Show" alums Rob Corddry and Ed Helms.
If you're interested in the full list, it's here.
As always, Webby winners are limited to five words for acceptance speeches. Last year, when late-night comedian Stephen Colbert accepted his award for "Person of the Year," his chosen five words were, "Me, me, me, me, me!"
What's different this year: In 2008, there were separate awards shows for the Webby Awards proper and the Film & Video offshoot. This year, perhaps because of budget cuts, both sets of awards will be presented at the same show on June 8, in conjunction with Internet Week New York. But it'll still be at its regular location at the luxe Cipriani Wall Street space--and Saturday Night Live's Seth Meyers will be hosting.
I'm still crossing my fingers for a surprise performance by Rick Astley, but at this point that fad is totally over.
SAN FRANCISCO--Friday night's Crunchies awards were host to more than 80 different nominated start-ups and large Web services. The winners, which had been chosen by once-a-day user voting since late November, were finally announced to an audience of approximately 900 people in the Herbst Theater here in downtown San Francisco.
Of the 16 different categories for awards, I've highlighted four of the most noteworthy winners and losers below. You can see the whole list of nominees and winners over here.
Winners
Microsoft's Live Mesh picked up the award for Best Technology Innovation/Achievement.It's an important service for Microsoft, despite its young age. You can read more about the award and Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie in this CNET News story.
FriendFeed was voted the Best New Start-up of the 2008. This is the equivalent of the rookie of the year award in any sport, and well-deserved. The site has seen tremendous growth since coming out of beta in February of last year, and has done a lot to differentiate itself from the scores of other aggregation services that came before it.
FriendFeed's Paul Buchheit accepts the award for best new start-up.
(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)GoodGuide, which won in the Most Likely To Make The World A Better Place category, made its debut at the TechCrunch50 conference back in September of 2008. It's a giant database of consumer products with ratings on each one's environmental impact or potentially harmful ingredients. This is a smart product, and something people at any level of tech ability can use. It narrowly won over Kiva which lets you send loans to people in developing countries.
Imeem won the Best Mobile Application award, beating out Google's voice-activated search application and music competitor Pandora. What makes this social music streaming product interesting is that the company eschewed developing its mobile application for larger, more established mobile platforms like Windows Mobile or the iPhone, and went straight for Google's Android instead. It was also one of the applications to launch with HTC's G1, the first Android handset.
Losers
Swype lost out on the Best technology innovation or achievement award to Microsoft's Live Mesh and wasn't even a runner up--an honor that went to Facebook's Connect service. Swype has the potential to be around a lot longer than either of the two though, and could one day replace the standard typing system used on mobile phones.
Evernote's CEO Phil Libin accepts the award for best mobile start-up.
(Credit: CNET Networks / Declan McCullagh)Facebook application Mob Wars lost out to Tapulous' Tap Tap Revenge game for the iPhone in the "Best Time Sink Site or Application" category. The app currently has 2,587,729 monthly active users.
Sliderocket didn't nab the Best Design award, which went to Cooliris. Sliderocket has a better business model though. It wants to ween people off PowerPoint and have them design presentations that are stored in the cloud. It's also got an offline component with an Adobe AIR application, which lets you store and access your presentations even when you're offline.
Qik got beat out of being the Best Mobile Start-up by Evernote. Evernote is a fantastic application, but I'd argue that its strength is in the desktop version, and that its mobile application isn't as impressive or game changing as Qik's live streaming capabilities. Qik was also one of the first mobile streaming services that would archive recordings and make them easier to share elsewhere. It's also scrappy, offering a streaming application for iPhone users with jail-broken handsets when Apple would not allow it through its SDK.
On Friday morning, YouTube announced the second annual iteration of its YouTube Video Awards. What? Awards?
The video-sharing service, owned by Google since 2006, awarded accolades in categories like "Adorable," "Creative," and "Comedy" to original videos hosted on its site that were uploaded in 2007, as voted on by users. The prizes, per YouTube, are "bragging rights, a trophy, and a special invitation to an event later this year."
Okay, so the videos are kind of amusing. The "Adorable" category winner is a video of a baby who falls over every time he laughs (wonder what'll happen when his friends find out about that in 10 years), the "Creative" winner is that "Human Tetris" thing you've seen a million times, and the "Music" winner is none other than that "Chocolate Rain" video that everyone was watching last year.
But the culture of YouTube doesn't really lend itself that well to awards. YouTube, for better or worse, is a cultural hub rather than strictly a creative outpost; there's plenty of cool, original content there, and it's no surprise that Google would want to highlight the good stuff rather than the goofy prank videos and pirated content that propelled it to the upper echelon of the Web.
Content on YouTube, however, doesn't necessarily become popular because it's high-quality or original--just look at the Rickroll phenomenon, an '80s music video that has been seen millions of times because people get a kick out of tricking their friends into watching it. Or the current hot clip, a British public service announcement with a hilarious twist.
Or, for that matter, this week's number-one YouTube video: Barack Obama's most recent speech.
AUSTIN, Texas--The South by Southwest Interactive Festival's 11th Annual Web Awards, which honors online innovations that saw their official launches in the previous year, kind of flew under the radar. Sure, an awards ceremony was held on Sunday night, but it unfortunately had to compete with a number of parties, dinner get-togethers among old friends, and a Twitter-organized bowling outing. And when it came to press, the Web Awards were largely eclipsed by reports surrounding the Mark Zuckerberg interview earlier that day.
But the Web Awards did indeed happen. Accolades were given out in 21 categories, ranging from "games" to "film/TV" to a people's choice winner. Some of the notable sites awarded were "social browser" Flock, which won the "community" category; funky video mixer Animoto in the film/TV category; and the Wired News site in the "classic" category. Wired bloggers Michael Calore and Megan McCarthy (no relation, we think--23andMe, where are you?) were spotted posing for photos with their Web Award at a Gawker Media party later on Sunday night.
The growing popularity of casual gaming was evident with the selection of Launchball as "best of show" as well as winner of the "games" category, and Kongregate as the "people's choice" winner.
But not every Web Awards winner was a piece of technology, per se. The "blog" category, which two-time SXSWi phenomenon Twitter won last year, went this year to Passive-Aggressive Notes. Hey, maybe it'll be the next I Can Has Cheezburger--although one of the lessons I think we've all learned at SXSWi 2008 is that saying "is the next" is so 2007.
(Credit:
Twitter)
Could this finally be what breaks Twitter out of the early-adopter geek set and into the population at large? The microblogging service has partnered with the inarguably mainstream MTV for its upcoming Video Music Awards (or VMAs), according to an e-mail sent to Twitter members by founder Biz Stone.
So far, the partnership isn't totally clear. A Twitter account has been set up for the VMA "Moon Man" mascot, the pop-culture awards' equivalent of the Oscar statue. In Stone's e-mail, he elaborated that the VMA Twittering will expand, too: "(MTV has) some fun ideas which involve artists and celebrities including the MTV Moonman twittering from Las Vegas during the whole weekend leading up to the VMA broadcast on Sunday, September 9th," he wrote, adding that Twitter would also be featured on TV.
This is indeed prominent placement for the heavily hyped Twitter, which gained a rabid following among the social media junkie crowd at this spring's South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. But as for breaking into the crowd that restricts its social networking use to Facebook, MySpace, and maybe Last.fm, Twitter hasn't been quite as successful. The MTV partnership could flop embarrassingly, or it could give the little site a big push.
Just think about it: maybe, the next time you go to the local mall, that teenage girl texting on her cell phone in Abercrombie & Fitch just might be Twittering about how she like, OMG totally loves those cute zip-up hoodies.
Quick note: I'll be on the live CNET TV stream today at 1:00 p.m. PT, talking with hosts Brian Cooley and Tom Merritt about the Webware 100. In particular, I'll run down my personal Webware 100 picks: my favorite winning sites that Web users voted on (see video on this page). Plus, if there's time, my picks that users did not vote into the winners' list.
You also can catch me weekly on the Real Deal podcast with Tom Merritt. Each Tuesday we try to demystify current tech topics. We just covered GPS, and next time we'll be talking about online photo storage.
And now the moment you've all been waiting for... The Webware 100 winners. Go to www.webware.com/100 to see the top 100 Web 2.0 products, 10 each in 10 categories, selected by the Web's users.
The project was a big success for Webware, and for Web users overall. Users cast 489,467 votes on our 250 finalists. Here's more data about the winning Web 2.0 services:
The 90/10 rule
Overall, 91 percent of all votes cast were for winning products.In many categories, there was a very steep drop-off between the top vote-getter and the No. 2 (and lesser) winners. In Browsing, for example, Firefox received 50 percent of all votes in the category, and the second-most-popular product, Opera, got only 13 percent.
The greatest disparity was in the Community category. Gaia Online won a staggering 91,293 votes--60 percent of the votes in its category and 19 percent of all votes cast in the awards.
The categories with the least amount of drop-off--the most even distribution of votes--were Productivity and Publishing. In Productivity, which also included Commerce, there was a block of votes (45 percent of all in the category) fairly evenly distributed among eBay, Amazon, and Paypal. Google Docs and Speadsheets and Google Calendar were in the next positions, and then there was a fairly straight-line drop-off for the remaining five winners in the category.
Publishing had no mass consumer brands in the top 10, as most of the other categories did. WordPress got the most votes. I was interested to see the Drupal CMS platform placing high in this category--above the consumer-oriented publishing products Typepad and Vox. Even combined, these two Six Apart services didn't come close to winning the same number of votes as Drupal.
The top 10 vote winners, which accounted for 45 percent of all votes, were, in alphabetical order:
... Read more
User voting for the Webware 100 awards closed this morning. Thanks to everyone who voted!
We will announce the winners next week, on June 18, if all goes according to plan. We're going to use the week to write up the winners and go through our voting database to make sure all the votes are legit.
Meantime, some early observations: There were 489,467 votes cast in the Webware 100. The most popular category was Community, due in large part to the overwhelming number of votes cast for the teen social network, Gaia Online. In the entertainment category, Stardoll, another site with a teen-girl demographic, demolished its competition. It's a good thing there will be 10 winners in each category.
And with that in mind, I am considering the launch of Webware's first spinoff site: Webware OMG, to cater to what is clearly the real power demographic on the Web.
