Webware

Thanks to the readers who contributed to the Webware 100 challenge in order to get a free all-access pass to Web 2.0 Expo, we now have a bunch of really good ideas for improving the Webware 100 awards program for 2009.

The two winning ideas (that are getting passes to the show) are:

1. Allow nominees to submit screencasts. I love this. We'll limit the pitches to 30 seconds, and we'll only ask for them from the finalists (not all the nominees), but this will be a great way to add some depth to the voting process.

2. Highlight the rookies. A few users wanted to know which of the finalists' products were actually new. We'll work on a way to both flag the new guys for next year and to highlight the rookies who are Webware 100 winners. We may even create a special award for the newbies.

Another idea we liked: have more categories. I hear you on this one. It was tough to fit all the products into 10 categories, and we had to make some tough choices to make it work at all. For example, we killed the "mobile" category outright this year, the logic being that mobile is a platform, not actually a category, and apps in particular categories such as "video" may (or may not) be mobile. Even so, I would have liked to have a mobile bucket, and we'll try to figure out a way to put it in for 2009.

On the other hand, another interesting idea was to kill the categories entirely and have 100 undifferentiated winners from a pool of several hundred finalists. I kind of like that, since so many products span categories, but I fear that the bigger the pool, the more the big fish would take over the voting, and the harder it would be for Webware 100 voters to find their personal winners in the big mosh pit of finalists.

We'll contact the winning readers with details on their passes very shortly. As I said in the original post, only the first people to submit the winning ideas get the passes.

Again, thanks to all who contributed. And don't forget to check back here on Monday, April 21, at noon Pacific Time, when we announce the winners of the 2008 Webware 100.

Web 2.0 Expo starts in San Francisco on April 22. It's the biggest Web 2.0 show there is, and Webware will be there in force, scouring the show looking for new companies, interviewing the architects of Web 2.0 companies, and celebrating the winners of the Webware 100, which we announce on April 21, right before the show opens. (Webware is a partner of the Web 2.0 Expo.)

As I've posted before, you can get a free exhibit pass, which also gets you in to the keynotes, by using the code "websf08pb6" at the Expo registration page.

But the Web 2.0 Expo is more than exhibit booths and talking heads (as fascinating as both are). There are also dozens of how-to workshops, strategy sessions, and behind-the-scenes presentations on Web 2.0 topics (see schedule). The full Web 2.0 Expo conference pass is valued at $1,695, but we have two to give away. Here's how to grab one for yourself:

Tell us what we did wrong in the Webware 100 this year.

Really, we want to know. While we increased the voting from the 2007 Webware 100 four-fold, from 490,000 votes cast in 2007 to more than 1.9 million this year, we know there's room for improvement. So let us have it. Enter your ideas in the talkback below before 6:00 p.m. PDT on Monday, April 14. Josh and I will pick the best ideas. In the case of multiple versions of an idea we like, the earliest entry will win. (So don't just rip off another idea that's already been entered.)

Use the feedback system below to tell us what you'd like to see. You'll have to register to post a comment, if you haven't already. Since we'll need to reach you if you're a winner, please be sure your e-mail address is current. If you've been registered on the CNET network for a while, use this form to check your e-mail address.

Best two entries get the passes. Good luck!

Also: Join us in the exhibit hall on Thursday, April 24 at 4:30 p.m. during the Web 2.0 Expo Booth Crawl. We'll be celebrating the Webware 100 winners then. And there will be beer. As in free.

We closed the voting for the 2008 Webware 100 today, after recording more than 1.9 million votes. Webware 100 Winners will be announced April 21 (we need time to go over the polling logs and write up blurbs for the winners). But in the meantime, we can already spot the major trends. The biggest shift, from last year, is that fewer sites for geeks are in the winners' circle.

In the hotly-contested Social category, for example, only the very largest sites generated enough votes to place in the Top 10. Even sites considered must-reads by the powerful nerd intelligentsia didn't have the pull to displace the major branded social networks.

Webware.com will continue to report on what's new, and will continue to evaluate the most recent innovations on the Web--the products of greatest interest to those of us who like to experiment with the newest ideas. We use programs such as the Webware 100 as a backstop, to show us which of these products and ideas are getting traction out there in the real world.

Vote distribution: Browsing and Social were the most contested.

Voting in the 2008 Webware 100 closes Monday, March 31 (at noon PDT), so if you haven't taken a moment to vote up for your favorite Web 2.0 applications in this year's contest, now's the time. We are closing in on 2 million votes cast in the 2008 Webware 100 awards, so be sure to get in there to make your opinion count.

I've heard form several readers that the Webware 100 finalist list is a great resource for people new to Web 2.0 applications. So if you're looking for 300 cool Web applications to use yourself, or to show off to other people as an example of what can now be done on the Internet, be sure to check out the full list of Webware 100 finalists.

We'll announce the winners of the 2008 Webware 100 on April 21. We'll start celebrating the winners' success at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which opens the next day. To get a free exhibit pass for the Web 2.0 Expo, use the code "websf08pb6" at the Expo registration page.

Go vote! >>

We're smack in the middle of our annual Webware 100 voting. Webware readers, and users from all over the Web, are letting us know what they think are the best Web apps out there. Or at least the best of the 300 finalists that we selected from a list of almost 5,000 eligible services.

The news is that we crossed the one million vote count Friday. So we're getting some pretty robust data on what's popular among Web users. I wish I could tell you which products are in the lead, but I don't want to skew votes at this point.

I can give out this info: Our two most popular categories for voting are Browsing and Social. That Social is doing well is no surprise; there's a lot of fierce competition in this space, and the inherently viral nature of the services mean voters move in packs. But Browsing? I know people have strong feelings about their browser, but I am surprised to see how many votes are coming in for this category.

Voting on the Webware 100 closes on March 31, so there's still time to get your licks in. Also, you can vote for up to three products in each category, so don't stress it if you feel you can't pick just one winner.

Go vote!

AllPeers, one of the 30 Webware 100 finalists in the Search & Reference category, is dead.

According to the company blog, the peer-to-peer file transfer service never got the user growth it needed to keep its investors happy. We covered the service a few times and gave it mixed reviews. I always thought it was an important product, but not a great one. It was a Webware 100 winner in 2007 and we made it a Webware 100 finalist again for 2008. However, early returns on AllPeers are not promising for this year: It has less than 1 percent of the vote in its category. (Part of that was our fault: It was somewhat misplaced in the Search group.)

We are removing AllPeers from the 2008 Webware 100, and this leaves us with 29 products in the Search & Reference category. We could leave it at that, but having only 29 products in this category offends my sense of order and symmetry, so I want to add another product to the polls while there's still time for it to make a fair showing in the voting. I could pick a product from our database of nominees, but I think I'll open this up to users instead. So, in the Search & Reference category, which product do you think should be added to the list of finalists? If the product you like is already a finalist (see list), please don't enter it here--vote for it instead.

I'm going to leave this write-in campaign up for just 24 hours--I will close it at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, March 4. So if you feel there's a Search product missing from the Webware 100, now's the time to make yourself heard. I want to be clear that this is not the vote. While I will strongly consider the number of nominees a write-in gets, ultimately I will pick what I feel is the most important product to be added to the polls. And once I do that, it will have to earn real votes like all the other finalists.

Update: The poll is closed. Based on the submissions (many of which were not for actual Search & Reference products), I picked Retrevo to replace AllPeers in the Search & Reference category. It will be added to the polling engine shortly.

I have received requests for an inclusive index of all 300 of the Webware 100 finalists. So if you're looking for a particular product in the Webware 100, check out this alphabetical list of all of them. Click through to the product's category page to read more about it and cast a vote.

As of this writing, we've recorded more than 840,000 unique Webware 100 product votes. That's already more than we got last year! We think this highlights how important Web-based apps are becoming to mainstream technology users--the audience that CNET aims to serve with this site, as we currently do with Download.com and CNET.com itself.

Click through to the permalink page for the list...

... Read more

Today we are opening up the user voting on the 2008 Webware 100. This is our yearly awards program where Webware users vote for their favorite Web 2.0 apps. In the 2007 Webware 100, there were more than 480,000 votes cast. And this year we have an even stronger lineup of finalists, so we expect very active voting.

Go vote now or read on for more about the 2008 Webware 100.

As we did in 2007, this year we collected products nominations from users (using WuFoo's online forms product). After all the nominations were in -- we had nearly 5,000 eligible entries -- Josh and I selected 30 products in each of ten categories to move on to the voting phase. Categorizing the finalists was a tricky task, since we were aiming for exactly 30 products in each category, but for the most part we think we found the most important webware products and put them in their best categories.

Voting will run until March 31. Winners will be announced on April 21, the day before the big Web 2.0 Expo opens. (The Expo is an official Webware 100 partner.)

We changed a few things around for this year's awards. We have separate categories for audio and video services, for example, and we killed the "mobile" category, since mobile is becoming more of an attribute of a Web 2.0 service than a type unto itself.

Our ten categories this year are:

• Audio: Music, podcasts, audiobooks.
• Browsing: Browsers, start pages, RSS readers, widgets, runtime engines.
• Commerce and events: Retail, auctions, travel, real estate, concerts, conferences.
• Communications: E-mail, chat, voice.
• Productivity: App suites, to-do lists, groupware.
• Publishing and photography: Blogging, content management, photo sites.
• Search and Reference: Search engines, encyclopedias, mapping.
• Social: Social networking, family sites, recommendations, online worlds, contests.
• Utility and Security: Infrastructure providers, storage, online protection.
• Video: Video storage, playback, streaming, editing, and animation.

One of the issues in the 2007 Webware 100 that I wanted to address this year was the very pronounced fall-off in votes from top products in a category. For example, in the "data" category in 2007, Google got half of all the votes; the other 24 finalists in the category had to scramble for attention. This year, we're doing something that I hope will make the races tighter: Users can vote up to three times in a category. So go ahead and vote for the obvious front-runner in each category, but also take the time to show your appreciation for other products that you like. Multi-voting will, I think, make the mid-pack battles more interesting.

We owe a big debt to PollDaddy, a 2007 Webware 100 winner in the "publishing" category, which this year is running the voting system for us. We told them we wanted this wacky three-vote-per-category system and they said, "no problem," and went and built it. PollDaddy is not in the running for a 2008 Webware 100 award, since we couldn't let our polling engine count votes for itself. But I did want to recognize the company for making this year's polls work.

I also want to explain why several popular products are not in the Webware 100. It's because we didn't allow into the voting products that were not publicly available by January 25, 2008. During our beta testing, a lot of people asked me why Hulu and Seesmic weren't in the 100. They were still in private beta when the eligibility period ended.

But there are certainly enough live products to make this year's contest interesting. So go vote, and be sure to check back on April 21 to see who the winners are in the 2008 Webware 100.

On Monday when we launch the voting for the Webware 100 awards, we're also going to go live with our partnership with the Web 2.0 Expo. This event, which starts on April 22, is the biggest Web 2.0 show there is, and we're thrilled that Webware and the Webware 100 will be part of it.

CNET, Webware's publisher, is no stranger to running big awards programs. We also run the Best of Show Awards at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

We will announce the Webware 100 winners on April 21, the day before the show opens, and we will celebrate the winners with a party during the Web 2.0 Expo booth crawl, on April 24 at 4:30 p.m. There will probably be other festivities as well. Watch this space.

Webware will have two full Expo passes to give out; details of that program will be announced shortly. Our readers can also get $100 off any educational program at the Expo, or a free exhibits-only pass, by using the priority code websf08ob3 on the Web 2.0 Expo registration page.