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It seems that the Webby Awards will be held in NYC this year on June 6. Gothamist can hear the paparazzi making sure they have a premiere or model's birthday to cover that night. The Daily News notes that during the dot com boom, NYC tried to land the awards, and now, finally after a few years of dot com bust-imposed online-only awards ceremonying, the Webbies are live again:
"The Webby hasn't gone away," said [Tiffany] Shlain, the Webby's creative director. "This year has been a very big year for the Web again, and I think it's appropriate for New York, because it's all about creativity."Huh? As far as we knew, New York was where one would have events to raise exposure outside of one's niche category.
The Webby Awards.
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I actually attended the awards during the peak of the dot-com boom in 1999 for the site I was working on at the time. Outside of paying your own accomodations to get there, the Webby Award ceremony "back in the day" was extravagant and quite large. I believe it was held in the S.F. War Memorial Opera House when I went. Jaw-dropping venue. Quite impressive. And nerve-wracking as a result.
Flash forward to 2003 and another site I work for is nominated. Nobody knows what is happening where. And when the awards happen, we're told that they instead having the entire event "webcast" so people should hold individual parties wherever people are. And in certain key cities there were pre-organized parties. Interesting. So here in NYC, the designated official NYC party was--literally--in some guys East Village tenement apartment. A large space, but nowhere close to an Opera House by any extent. It was some guys apartment! And there was a hilllarious "door person" who stood out in the hallway of the East Village walkup who "checked us in".
Quite a study in contrasts. I think industry accolades are needed. But the Webby Awards is dysfunctional at best. Delluded at worst.