The Oscars of the Internet

One evening last year on my way home from work, I listened to a podcast of an interview with Tiffany Shlain, the founder of the Webby Awards. While she talked about the awards ceremony, I wondered what it would be like to win a Webby and spend an evening with the Web's most accomplished visionaries and creative pioneers.

A year later, the Indiana University Office of Creative Services received notice that one of our Web sites was among the top five finalists in the “School” category. For nearly a month, we wondered about our chances of winning. Then, the day the winners were announced, I got a call just after 7:00 a.m. No, it wasn't the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. It was Jane Below, the information architect for the project. We had won. She had checked the site twice before calling me.

The Webby Awards ceremony is held in New York City on Wall Street, the financial center of the world. It was fitting for David-Michel Davies, executive director of the Webby Awards, to speak about the financial impact of the Web, especially to an audience that included Meg Whitman, the CEO of eBay, and Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, co-founders of YouTube.

Whitman accepted her award along with a few hand-picked eBay millionaires, Chen and Hurley joked about their billion-dollar deal with Google, and after the ceremony we walked outside to see Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz conducting one of their Diet Coke and Mentos experiments. It's mostly how they are making a living now.

The Web has certainly affected the U.S. economy and culture in the past decade. (Did I mention that David Bowie and the Beastie Boys were in attendance to receive awards for their pioneering methods of connecting with fans?) In fact, it's even difficult for me to remember a time before the Internet (but I do remember Gopher). My first job after college was writing a newsletter for the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System about how new technologies such as BITNET and even e-mail were being used to foster communication among researchers in higher education. We've come a long way since then, and I'm proud that IU has been at the forefront since the beginning.

No one knows what the future of the Web holds, but I have a feeling we'll be ready. We really liked being part of the Webby crowd.