Ceremony honors Internet writers

Internet literature took a step closer to becoming a recognized form of writing yesterday with the announcement of the winners of the nation's first Internet literature contest.

The awards for the first PC Home Online Internet Literature Award, organized by PC Home Online -- one of Taiwan's first Chinese-language portals -- took place yesterday at an Eliste Bookstore, with over 100 contestants in attendence.

Candidates for the awards were chosen from the online writing group Mypaper, part of the PC Home Web site. The Mypaper Web site includes the personal Web sites of more than 50,000 people containing more than 620,000 online works.

In the first round of the competition, Web site owners voted for 102 of 2,753 contestants to proceed to the second round. Those who entered the second round submitted five writing pieces to the organizers to decide who the winners would be.

Because of the diversity of the online works, the organizers decided not to place any restrictions on the form, length or topics of writing.

"Internet literature is such a new form of expression that nobody really knows what it is," said Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志), founder and chairman of PC Home Online.

"The award is therefore aimed at discovering good writers rather than to find the best writers -- in a bid to promote the development of Internet literature," he said.

Participants in the contest said that Mypaper had provided them with a forum to express themselves and to share their feelings and creativity online with other Internet users.

"Writing on the Net is a way for people [who have experienced some form of trauma] to sort out their feelings and regain their peace of mind," said the runner-up, Juliana, who uses only her English name on her Web site.

Juliana's site records her experiences since her 17-year-old son was killed after being run over by a bus in 1998.

"It has given me a way to relieve my pain and sorrow," she said.

A member of the judges panel, the Internet novelist Neal Wu (藤井樹), told the Taipei Times that there are no fixed criteria for a good piece of Internet literature.

"As long as a work triggers your feelings, makes you laugh or touches your heart with its expression, it could be considered a good piece of Internet literature," he said.

But Siang Yang (向陽), a renowned poet and commentator on Internet literature, said that such literature should be a literary form that "goes beyond text" by utilizing the distinctive traits of Internet.

"In other words, to differentiate Internet literature from traditional literature, Internet literature should be a combination of text, visual images and music," he said.