The fourth annual Webby Awards, honoring excellence and innovation on Internet sites, felt more like a bacchanal. Held in Nob Hill, one of San Francisco's ritziest neighborhoods, the event, from the candlelit pre-party at the Grace Cathedral, to the post-party under white tents at a scrupulously groomed park, was all wild costumes, slinky models, and food, wine and spirits every which way you looked.
But that was last year.
At the fifth annual Webby Awards, on Wednesday night, the mood, like the once-packed restaurants and bars in this city's once high-techie neighborhoods, was notably quieter.
With good reason: Since last year's Webby Awards, more than 500 Internet companies have gone out of business. One-fifth of last year's 135 nominees are out of business and more than half of the 71 Webby Award winners have gone under, been sold or had huge layoffs.
With thousands of dot-comers out of work, joining the Peace Corps, taking in roommates and moving back in with their parents, the Webbys, which chose winners from 150 nominees in 30 categories, was faced with some nominees that had already folded or that stood on the brink.
Much of the show, which for the second year was hosted by Alan Cumming, the impish Scottish actor [who won a Tony award for his role in Cabaret], made light of the dot-bomb industry. Even the show's theme "Do You Still Believe?" poked fun at the reality check of last year.
Tiffany Shlain, the founder and director of the Webbys and its nominating body, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, did seem to tire a bit of reporters' persistent questions about sagging Net fortunes. In the end, she said, a site's financial health was simply not important in judging its excellence.
"How many books that win Pulitzers are best sellers?" Shlain said. "How many shows that win Emmys still don't make it?"
While well known sites like Travelocity.com and TheOnion.com won Webbys, so did pixyland.org/peterpan (this site, run by a man dressed like Peter Pan, won in the "weird" category) and craigslist.org, which was named best community site by both the academy and by more than 150,000 people who voted in the people's voice awards during a Webcast of the show. The Webbys also honored nonprofit sites like VolunteerMatch.org, for activism, and OpenSecrets.org, for politics.
And while the mood was quieter than last year's and the celebrities fewer (the journalist Sam Donaldson and Julia Butterfly Hill, who sat in a redwood tree for two years, were the biggest non-Net presenters), this is not to say that the Webbys was not a big, merry party.
It was. The ceremony moved from last year's venue, the 2,000-seat Masonic Temple, to the 3,000-seat San Francisco War Memorial Opera House and was still packed. Pink wigs, peekaboo gowns and feather boas (the dress code on the invitation said "gutsy") were heavily represented, and spirits seemed high, even with the long lines to the bar and the empty trays on the appetizer tables.
The ceremony was fast-paced, largely due to the Webby rule limiting acceptance speeches to five words. (They included "Hi, Mom, I love you," and "The secret to happiness is ...")
"Next to the Webbys, the Oscars, Emmys and other televised award shows feel like being sentenced to a week's detention with the class bore," said Scot Harris, a freelance Web page designer, as he sipped a martini from a plastic cup after the show.
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