/Culture/ .net Awards winners!
09/01/2008 | Filed under Discover > Culture
The 10th annual .net awards are upon us. Who’s won, who’s lost, who’s the hottest property on the internet? Jason Walsh reveals the names behind the net
Everyone likes to be recognised – isn’t that why we all put our mugshots up on social networking sites? But what about real recognition for hard work? That’s what the .net Awards are all about.
A hand-picked team of experts have worked their way through the shortlists and have come up with a variety of winners who run the gamut of the internet from innovative mobile sites to Flash development, web standards and back again.
Intended as a universal stamp of approval, the .net Awards confer on the winners the confidence of a combination of user experience and expert opinion. Taken together, .net’s winners and shortlisted competitors are a snapshot of what’s exciting on the web today.
The categories are as follows: design agency of the year, web app of the year, best socially powered site, blog of the year, podcast of the year, the innovation award, web personality of the year, viral campaign of the year, the open source award, standards champion (best use of accessible design), redesign of the year, new site of the year (the people’s choice award), mobile site of the year, best mashup, the interactive award for best use of Flash, and the dreaded infamy award. Without further ado, let’s open the envelopes.
DESIGN AGENCY OF THE YEAR: PRELOADED
Runners-up: Fortune Cookie, Wefail, Less Rain
Preloaded is one of Britain’s preeminent digital design agencies. With a client list that includes Channel 4 and MTV, it comes as no surprise that the agency was a serious contender for Design Agency of the Year.
And it’s won! Beating off stiff competition from the likes of Fortune Cookie and Less Rain, Preloaded has come out as the Design Agency of the Year.
“The last year has been fantastic,” says Preloaded’s creative director and co-founder Rob Corradi, “in that we’ve added quite a few new clients to our books.” It’s not just new clients that Preloaded has been working with, though. The agency has also been investigating new ways of working and new ideas: “We’ve been doing a lot of as-yet-unseen work in the social networking space. Before, we’ve tended to do entertainment-related things for our clients, but now we’ve been working with the whole ‘Web 2.0’ thing.”
Some of Preloaded’s new clients include The Science Museum and work on the BBC’s Later with Jools Holland. This shift in focus reflects changes in how the internet is being used, something Preloaded has been able to keep up with: “We were known as a Flash agency. Nowadays, it’s split down the middle between ‘traditional’ HTML sites and Flash builds. We’re very standards-based, using what’s right for the job.”
The Jools Holland project with the BBC is a particularly interesting concept: “We’ve just finished the new site for Later with Jools Holland. It will enable users to see extended clips not seen on the show, and to make use of this content by embedding it into their own blogs and social network pages. That’s quite a shift for the BBC. Things like our work for The Science Museum and CDX for BBC History have been high-concept sites, and might have crashed and burned. We’ve done a lot of projects in the last 12 months that, on paper, were quite ‘out there’ – we didn’t know if people would like the finished products until the closing stages.” Among these is the aforementioned CDX, a multi-episode ‘interactive video adventure’. Likewise, Launchball, developed for The Science Museum, is a fun game rather than a lecturing session. Clearly, Preloaded’s risk-taking has paid off, as the firm is experiencing growth, both in terms of its staff and its reputation. Founded in 2000, the agency now has a total staff count of 23.
Experience
The team’s collective background in new media stretches back to the days before the internet was common currency. “We have an immense amount of combined experience here at Preloaded,” says Rob Corradi. “People have degrees or past lives in film, print, fine art, photography, engineering and many other diverse origins. Digital has offered the opportunity to express ourselves in new ways, so we’ve all gravitated towards it through personal interest.”
The company tries to take an organic view of things and not look too far into the future: “What we’re pleased with is how we’ve grown in the last 18 months without the quality of our work suffering. We have a fan base – there are people who look forward to new Preloaded stuff!” As for winning, despite the agency’s hard work, they remain bashful: “We were genuinely surprised. We didn’t think we had a chance of getting shortlisted, let alone winning. We were quite gobsmacked and we’re all very happy. It’s great!”
VIRAL CAMPAIGN OF THE YEAR: WILL IT BLEND?
Runners-up: The Simpsons Movie, Get the Glass, Cadbury, X Factor
Nobody likes chain letters, and email has made things worse – that Forward button is just too tempting for some people. Despite this, one new form of the perennial round robin has captured the hearts of net users, not to mention the advertising budgets of many companies: the viral.
2007’s winner in the Viral of the Year category is Will It Blend?. After all, who doesn’t like seeing iPods, iPhones and even cigarette lighters mashed into an inedible soup?
George Wright from blender manufacturer Blendtec told .net how the campaign came about: “The company has been composed of commercial sales – we’d had a hard time getting traction with consumers. Will It Blend? was really an attempt to raise consciousness,” he says.
Bizarrely, Will It Blend? wasn’t dreamt-up by a well-paid advertising consultant. Instead, the videos came about when Wright, a relative newcomer to Blendtec, saw how the company’s chief executive, Tom Dickson, tested equipment.
“To put out a viral campaign was my idea. I’d begun working for the company just over a year ago and saw that the CEO, Tom Dickson, tested blenders by trying to destroy them by jamming in a two-by-four board!
“The funny thing was that it blended! I thought ‘This is way awesome, people need to see this’.”
Increased sales
Since its initial launch just over a year ago, Will It Blend? has become one of the most popular viral campaigns ever, and Blendtec has gone from strength to strength as Tom Dickson has blended ever more bizarre, sturdy and expensive things in his machines.
Will It Blend? demonstrates the simple power of a good idea and that viral campaigns can now compete with, and even out-do, traditional mass media advertising: “Because we’re a smaller company, we were able to put out something edgy and fun,” says Wright. “In terms of the product you see on YouTube, our sales have gone up by 500 per cent.”
The infrastructure is already in place. All you need to do is have the great idea and be willing to take the risk of putting it out for everyone to see: “It’s had a huge impact in terms of brand awareness,” he says.
Despite the success, like all of this year’s winners, Wright and Blendtec remain humble: “We’re elated to win,” says Wright. “What an honour!”
BEST MASHUP OF THE YEAR: FLASH EARTH
Runners-up: Flickrvision, WalkJogRun, WikiMapia, HotelMap
Mashup, it’s one of those terms – just a touch too hip and happening, as if it was 1995 once more we’re all reading Mondo 2000 again. But still, the growing proliferation of open APIs and raw data on the web that anyone can use has unleashed the creative power of many a developer.
And the accolade for best mashup goes to Paul Neave’s Flash Earth.
Flash Earth, like all good mashups, is a simple idea beautifully executed. Its developer, Paul Neave (neave.com), has created a Flash-based website that enables visitors to choose a location anywhere on the globe and compare the imagery from Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Windows Live Local, Ask.com Maps, Nasa and OpenLayers.
Perhaps Neave is unaware of the success of his site, but Flash Earth will stand him in good stead in the coming months: “I’ve mostly been travelling over the last year. I’m back now and I’m going to do more freelance work. I’m moving to London as well,” he says. Or perhaps it’s just modesty: characteristically, Neave is refusing to let his ego become inflated: “I don’t pay too much attention to awards. It’s nice, but I need to be proud of the content.”
For Neave, 2008 will mean more work: “I’m trying to be more prolific and make lots of content,” he says. “I want to do some Facebook and MySpace widget stuff, and some experimental work with Flash.”
He’ll also be looking back at Flash Earth: “I’m hoping to use Papervision3D on Flash Earth. I hope to make it more like Google Earth and add more interesting imagery, including from Nasa.”
Who knows, perhaps Neave will win this award again next year?
STANDARDS CHAMPION – BEST USE OF ACCESSIBLE DESIGN: DAN CEDERHOLM
Runners-up: Bruce Lawson, Molly Holzschlag, Roger Johansson, John Oxton
We all know the refrain – standards must prevail – and thankfully they do, thanks to the hard work of designers and standards advocates who’ve fought tooth and claw to improve the web experience. .net’s Standards Champion for 2007 is Dan Cederholm.
Massachusetts-based SimpleBits is Cederholm’s design studio. And though it may be “tiny”, SimpleBits has been at the forefront of re-imagining the web. “I’m flattered, honoured, surprised and shocked,” he says. “It’s pretty cool [to win], and .net seems like a really cool magazine.”
Cederholm explains how he became a firm believer in standards. “There are a lot of reasons why standards are important,” he says. “They’re important for me as a web designer in terms of the ease of maintenance, but the most important thing is that they’re good for users.
“If you think of the web as being about trying to reach as many people as possible, then using standards is a no-brainer: clean code, performance, user accessibility.”
Eureka moment
Cederholm’s background in web design stretches back before standards were widely applied, and he remembers what the internet was like back then: “I started learning HTML before ‘web standards’ was a term, building sites with tables and spacer GIFs.”
Fortunately, there was a road to Damascus moment for this, and many other, web designers: an article on A List Apart that suggested giving up on the Netscape 4 browser and moving on with standards-based design.
“Big sites like Wired redesigned,” says Cederholm. “I was working for FastCompany.com at the time, and we took the opportunity to redesign with CSS.”
Of course, Cederholm isn’t blind to the problems designers face with CSS, such as a steep learning curve and the need for hacks: “The learning curve is a problem. I can talk about the benefits of CSS, but it does require a lot of time.”
Despite the fact that many web designers feel that standards are now firmly entrenched, Cederholm remains aware that there’s work to be done: “The war of ridding the web of tables is far from over. There are so many more sites out there that need to be improved on. There are large sites that have lots of visitors and don’t use standards.”
The future looks bright, though, and it looks like CSS and standards will improve the net: “A lot’s happening with CSS3 and HTML 5. It will be interesting to see what happens five years from now.”
MOBILE SITE OF THE YEAR: GMAIL
Online all the time. Whether you think we’ve been unchained from our desks or conned into working free overtime, there’s no doubt we’re becoming increasingly used to accessing the web from our phones. Unsurprisingly, the mobile web is fast becoming a leading area of web development.
The winner of Mobile site of the year is, of course, Google’s Gmail.
Christian Miccio, product manager for Gmail, expressed his feelings about winning the award: “We’re really pleased to have won this award. 2007 has been a good year for Google Mail. We opened up our email service to everyone, and we’ve got millions of users worldwide in over 40 languages. And we’re looking forward to providing a better, faster email service. We launched Google Mail with the aim of providing users with a unique email experience. It’s easy to navigate, easy to organise, and easy to find all your stored emails. We’re particularly excited about our anti-spam technology, which enables users to spend less time clearing out spam, and more time doing what email was intended to do. We’re looking forward to responding to user requests to make Google Mail even better.”
PODCAST OF THE YEAR: RUSSELL BRAND
Runners-up: Media Guardian, Best of Chris Moyles, Onion Radio News, This Week in Tech
The internet has changed the media landscape beyond recognition. What’s been harder to predict, though, is just how it would do it. Who would have thought that it would mean the rebirth of radio? More than that, who would have thought that broadcast radio would marry the belle of the ball, podcasting?
This year’s Podcast Award goes to BBC Radio’s Russell Brand Show. Brand, one of the nation’s liveliest comedians and broadcasters, keeps going from strength to strength, something his hugely popular podcast proves. .net interviewed Nic Philips, Russell Brand’s producer, to find out more about the eccentric man and his new media venture.
As Philips explains, podcasting was a natural development for Brand’s brand: “As far as I know, the podcast was born at pretty much the same time as the Saturday show. The show began almost exactly a year ago, just as the BBC podcast trial was getting into full swing, and it seemed logical that the newest show on the network should get one, especially as Russell was always going to appeal to the younger end of the Radio 2 demographic – the podcast literate.”
First award
Asked if there’s anything about Russell Brand’s personality that’s particularly suited to the medium, Philips replied in the affirmative: “Everything! The radio show is speech-heavy – probably more so than any other show on the network, so it’s perfectly podcastable.
“Russell’s humour comes from his profoundly colourful comedic imagination and his unique understanding of language. He and Matt (his co-host) will spend a few minutes on each topic before moving on to the next, which lends itself neatly to the segment structure of a podcast. He then cleverly ties up topics, and back-references them to unify the podcast as a whole.
“We’ve spent much of the last nine months hovering around the top spot of the iTunes podcast chart, and our listening figures continue to rise. But, of course, figures should always be taken with a pinch of salt. In my mind, the really exciting success comes from our email and text responses.”
Despite Brand’s explosive career trajectory, he and his team are delighted to win recognition in this year’s awards: “It’s a great honour. Russell, Matt and Mr Gee were over the moon at hearing that we’d won it, as it’s the first award that the podcast has won,” wrote Philips. “It’s such a privilege that something we all believe in so much has received official recognition as well.”
BEST REDESIGN OF THE YEAR: APPLE
Runners-up: Manchester Utd, The New York Times, Waterstone’s, Guardian Unlimited
Unfortunately, in the great tradition of awards ceremonies, no one from Apple was available to comment on the award, so .net asked some experts what they made of Apple’s shiny new site.
Rune Leth from designers and accessibility experts Fortune Cookie (fortunecookie.co.uk), whose colleague Julie Howell was on .net’s panel of judges, wrote: “On the whole, I like it. It’s obvious that the intent of the site design concept is to mirror the look and feel of the Apple products, and this has been accomplished.
“Unfortunately, I have to say I’m not impressed with the navigation of the site. It has an enormous amount of links with nothing to help identify the user journey. There were times I found myself looking for a breadcrumb trail.”
Pros and cons
Leth felt that Apple’s renowned keen sense of the visual was apparent in the site’s design: “There’s no doubt this is the Apple website, and that’s despite the downplaying of its famous logo. The subtle colour schemes of the Apple products are clearly visible on the site and the site has the same quality look and feel that the Apple products clearly have.”
Asked about the issue of accessibility, however, Leth points out that even Apple doesn’t get everything right: “I really wish that Apple had pushed the envelope a bit further when it was dealing with the question of accessibility. Issues include in-HTML styling and some of the headings are listed nonsemantically.
“Some of the navigation relies on JavaScript. This means the navigation isn’t usable by users who browse using the keyboard, and in some cases, the navigation breaks when JavaScript isn’t available.”
Patrick Lauke (splintered.co.uk) from the University of Salford, also a member of the judging panel, discussed the Apple Store: “I would say the store is the one that’s furthest ahead in terms of design and the markup behind it,” he says.
“The redesign has received a lot of press from the likes of Jeffrey Zeldman, and it’s quite nice. The pages don’t validate but, like all big sites, it’s probably got lots of legacy code.”
Lauke says that a lot of good design practice has been used to create the site: “There are no tables other than where they’re appropriate – it uses a lot of lists and everything is done with CSS.”
Breadcrumbs
He also notes that keyboard and screen reader users haven’t been forgotten: “The main Apple site relies on mouse-driven events, but with the store, you can navigate with the keyboard. One thing I was pleased to see was a breadcrumb trail. It uses a list from the homepage of the store. That’s something I’ve been saying for ages,” he says.
“I hope these things will find their way into the main site as well. At least it shows the store’s developers know the score about accessibility and usability.”
INFAMY OF THE YEAR: MYSPACE
Runners-up: Internet Explorer, Microsoft, Windows Vista, Amazon
Awards aren’t all about the brightest and best. Sometimes it’s important to acknowledge the underbelly of the web, too.
.net’s panel of judges has judged social networking site MySpace to be the winner of this year’s Infamy Award.
This is a tough one – MySpace clearly irks design professionals with its garish colours and complicated layouts but, on the other hand, it’s popular and does its job well.
Smartening up
MySpace has grown and continues to grow, despite stiff competition from the likes of Bebo and the considerably more muted Facebook. Pages are, of course, customisable – something that inevitably leads to some astonishingly, eyeball-bleeding, poor design. Hey, it’s democracy in action!
That said, there’s a lot that MySpace could do to get itself smartened up, and yet nothing seems to be happening. Perhaps the “undesign” side of MySpace lends it some underground credibility – who knows?
INTERACTIVE AWARD – BEST USE OF FLASH: GET THE GLASS
Runners-up: Halo 3, Paper Critters, HBO Voyeurs, Jumpman 23
Interactivity, that’s what it’s all about. After all, if we were interested simply in static images, we may as well all pack up and go back to print design.
This is something our interactive award winners know. Designed for the California Milk Processor Board, Get the Glass is .net’s Interactive Site of the Year.
Designed by Sweden’s North Kingdom, Get the Glass is an innovative mixture of a board game and arcade-style interactive challenges. The past 12 months have been very active for the agency behind the site: “Busy? It’s crazy! We turn down so many job offers because we’re still a small agency,” says North Kingdom’s David Eriksson.
Indeed, North Kingdom is not only small, it has managed to achieve the seemingly Sisyphean challenge of becoming a noted agency based in an incredibly obscure place, specifically the virtually Arctic town of Skellefteå in northern Sweden.
Recognition
The agency has also opened an office in metropolitan Stockholm. Now known all around the world, North Kingdom – a self-proclaimed “design monarchy” – is riding high on recognition for its hard work: “From our point of view, success is to be able to work with global brands such as Vodafone, Toyota, Coke and so on, and do interesting stuff with them. We’ve had our share of awards, but for us, that’s what matters.” In fact, when .net called Eriksson, he was on location filming for a top-secret project with Coca-Cola.
According to Eriksson, the nature of North Kingdom’s relationships with its client base has started to change: “We’re working more directly with clients and the branding and marketing department,” he says.
North Kingdom is proud of its work on the celebrated Get the Glass site: “Rob [Lindström] was lead art director on the project. He and I always want to make real stuff, not just on the computer,” says Eriksson. A quick look a Gettheglass.com confirms that the desire has manifest itself in a remarkable site. Notability is, of course, inevitable and North Kingdom has its fans: “We get emails now and then from people who want T-shirts and merchandise! This side of it is difficult to take care of because, at the end of the day, we’re making business, not art,” he says, though he’s clearly pleased that the agency’s work is appreciated. On winning, Eriksson says: “We’re always very, very pleased when our work is recognised. It’s surreal – we’re in a small town in the north of Sweden!”
INNOVATION OF THE YEAR: GOOGLE EARTH
Runners-up: Google Calendar, Second Life, Adobe Premiere Express, Joost
The saying goes, “a week is a long time in politics” – well, it’s a longer time on the net. The web is developing at an astonishing pace, with innovation piled upon innovation.
According to .net’s esteemed panel of judges, the single best innovation has been the continual progress of Google Earth.
The ability to view maps and aerial photos via Google Maps and its competitors is impressive, but Google Earth is nothing short of revolutionary.
Amit Sood, EMEA product marketing manager for Geo products at Google, told .net that the team has been working hard on improving its amazing app: “This has been an incredibly exciting and busy year for the Google Earth team around the world, so it’s hard to know where to start. We launched Sky View in Google Earth in August, which was the result of hard work from our engineers in Pittsburgh, and was well-received by Earth fans everywhere.”
While most of us use Google Earth for entertainment or distraction, Sood explains that the application has found many more serious uses: “We’ve seen some really amazing examples of Google Earth technology being used to help people during disasters such as the forest fires in Southern California, and just recently we partnered with the UN and Cisco on their Millennium Development Goals project, helping people to chart the progress of the fight against global poverty. And, of course, this is only a few of the things we’ve seen this past year.”
WEB PERSONALITY OF THE YEAR: KEVIN ROSE
Runners-up: Robert Scoble, Jimmy Wales, Molly Holzschlag, Leo Laporte
Celebrity culture is a funny thing – people are increasingly interested in, obsessed even, with the actions of people they don’t know. Well, .net’s Web Personality of the Year winner may not be as famous as Paris Hilton, but at least he’s done something! Quite a lot, in fact.
Kevin Rose is best known as the founder of Digg, the popular social news website. But, in a fascinating reversal of the new-web-order of things, he actually got his start through television.
Rent money
“I was hired to do behind-the-scenes stuff for the Screensavers on TechTV. I began to do segments and became the full-time host,” says Rose. “It was pretty crazy interviewing people such as Steve Wozniak. It spurred me on to do something myself.”
Rose was unprepared for the phenomenon that Digg was to become: “When I started, I thought ‘if it pays for the servers and a chunk of my rent, I’ll be happy’. I wish I could say I knew it was going to be big, but I didn’t.”
Big it is, though – October 2007 saw 20 million unique visitors. Rose has even bigger plans for Digg’s future: “We’ll be launching ‘images’ in the next couple of months. Once people can sift through videos, images and news stories, that will be really interesting,” he says. “We also want to explore the connections between people.”
How does he fit everything into his schedule? Remember that, aside from Digg, Rose also heads up Pownce (pownce.com), and works on other projects including the weekly podcast Diggnation.
“It’s difficult – it’s pretty much called not having a girlfriend,” he laughs. “I set aside one day a week for the podcast and I’m pretty much hands-off when it comes to Revision3.” Speaking of which, Revision3, another media enterprise that Rose is involved in – which describes itself as “the first media company that gets it” – is a genuine internet trailblazer. Distributing its video via BitTorrent, Revision3 is effectively a nonlinear television network for the web.
“It’s been pretty crazy,” says Rose, “We’ve grown, here at Digg, from just over a dozen employees to 39. We’re trying to manage the growth and expand Diggnation. Pownce is a project I spend some weekend time on.”
Rose, like all our winners, is gracious in victory, but he adds a remark that will brighten the day of every person involved with .net: “It’s an honour. It’s really quite cool. I’ve been a big fan of Future Publishing. Every time I go to London or into the speciality bookshops here in the US, I look them up.”
SOCIALLY POWERED SITE OF THE YEAR: FACEBOOK
Runners-up: Digg, YouTube, Last.fm, Purevolume
The social web has taken off like no one could have imagined. Of course, we probably should have – we’re social beings, after all. Nevertheless, social sites have had a huge impact on what we do online and how we do it. From sharing video, photos and music, social software has prevailed.
Straightforward social networking, meanwhile, has seen explosive growth, and it’s a social networking site that has won our Socially Powered Site of the Year award: Facebook.
From humble (ish) beginnings as a service for students at US universities, Facebook has gone on to traverse the globe, certainly stealing MySpace’s thunder.
The key to Facebook’s popularity is twofold: it’s a damn site more muted than MySpace – something which would explain its popularity with older users. Secondly, it’s extensible – developers can add fun and interesting applications that Facebook members can then use, of which the most notorious time-consumer is Facebook Scrabble. Today, virtually anyone or anything you can imagine is on Facebook. Unfortunately, no one from Facebook was available to speak to .net in time for the magazine going to press, but we passed on our congratulations.
BEST BLOG OF THE YEAR: ENGADGET
Runners-up: Cute Overload, Lifehacker, icanhascheezburger, TreeHugger
The buzz may have moved on to podcasts, vidcasts, The buzz may have moved on to podcasts, vidcasts, photocasts and who knows what else, but blogging remains a central activity to the web. Perhaps the most democratic of all media, blogging gives a voice to anyone who cares to write based on their ability and commitment. So, the Blog of the Year accolade goes to Engadget.
Engadget is an incredibly popular blog focused on personal technology, and is a part of the huge Weblogs Inc network, formerly a small start-up and now a part of AOL.
Ryan Block, editor in chief at Engadget, says the last year has been surprising: “It’s been pretty crazy,” he says. “I thought a site like Engadget, which has grown so much over the years, would have levelled-out, but it hasn’t.”
Reader meet-ups
“In the last year, we’ve grown quite rapidly. According to some of our stats, our traffic has doubled!” In fact, September 2007 saw Engadget receive just under 10 million views – an incredible figure. Block is clearly enjoying his work and has even gone out to meet and greet readers: “The long and the short of it is that it’s been fantastic. We’ve had a couple of reader meet-ups in Tokyo and San Francisco. 1,000 people showed-up in San Francisco and I was blown away!”
According to Block, success cannot be simply weighed; quality is more important than quantity: “Everybody talks about hits and visitors – I think we’re doing a good job if we’re doing a good job.” Engadget must be doing something right, because readers keep coming back, something Block isn’t unaware of: “The blogosphere is a direct meritocracy. People will notice you if you do something right.”
OPEN SOURCE APPLICATION OF THE YEAR: FIREFOX
Runners-up: Ruby on Rails, WordPress, Drupal, OpenOffice
The open source revolution has changed the face of software. In fact, open source technologies underpin much of the internet, from the Linux operating system that’s cornered the server market through to the Apache webserver and the myriad of programming languages that developers can choose to work with. Open source is massive – but it can sometimes be almost invisible.
That’s why it’s gratifying to see this year’s Open Source Award go to a project with much higher end-user visibility: Firefox.
Tristan Nitot, president and founder of Mozilla Europe, spoke to .net about what Firefox’s backer, Mozilla, has been up to for the last year and what’s in store for 2008: “Mozilla is an incredible ride,” he says. “We passed 400 million downloads and have more than 120 million active users worldwide.” The Mozilla Foundation is itself also growing and now has a total of 120 staff across the globe.
Firefox became the browser with buzz, not only because of its ease of use, but also its rock-solid technology and support for web standards. Nitot says there’s plenty more work to do: “Our biggest challenge is to ship Firefox 3,” he says. “That’s the big thing for 2008.”
BEST WEB APPLICATION OF THE YEAR: WORDPRESS
Runners-up: Facebook, Crazy Egg, Gmail, Google Docs
.net’s final award is for the Web Application of the Year – awarded to the tool that arguably brings more to the web experience than any other app. This year, the winner is WordPress.
Beating off very stiff competition from the likes of Google Docs, WordPress has claimed the crown, representing another victory for open source software (and for blogging).
WordPress’ founder and original developer, Matt Mullenweg, took time out from his busy schedule to talk to .net: “The last year has been a whirlwind,” he says. “It’s almost impossible to keep up.”
It’s not just WordPress’ phenomenal growth he’s talking about either – though WordPress is part of it, Mullenweg feels that the power of the internet is beginning to reveal itself in full: “There feels like a confluence of things around web technologies, which are coming together to enable us to do the things we always wanted to do.”
As for WordPress, it’s been growing at a rate of knots. Wordpress.com, the hosted weblogs side of the company, has grown amazingly: “We went from 1.5 million visits to 100 million,” he says. “Last month, it was just over 100 million visits.” Accordingly, Wordpress.com is now one of the top 20 sites in the US.
New version
WordPress the application, meanwhile, has seen some big changes and is due to see more.
“This year was interesting,” says Mullenweg. “In 2006, we didn’t really release anything [saving updates for major releases]. In 2007, we released a new version every three months.
“The big feature coming is the next release – [version] 2.4. We’ve already added widgets, taxonomy and so on, but the next release will be a complete redesign.”
At least partially, the focus will be on ease of use: “It’s still too difficult to use, even though it’s been a success,” he says.
On winning the award, Matt Mullenweg is gracious, faintly embarrassed even: “I’m humbled. It’s not something I was expecting. I’ll have to visit England more,” he laughs.
THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE AWARD
To see the New Site of the Year, as voted for by you, head to www.thenetawards.com
