Webby list: Craigslist expands outside San Francisco
Alternative: Freecycle launches
Craigslist never really took off in the UK, but still it’s held up as the single cause of the death of classified advertising. We had the advertising paper Loot, which was eating up the classified market long before the web found its feet, and now there’s Freecycle, on which all sorts of goods are offered free to anyone willing to come and collect it, proving that just getting rid of your old stuff is the motivation for most vendors rather than income.
Webby list: Google AdWords launches
Alternative: Wordpress.com opens
The Webby committee praised Google for opening up the advertising market to even the tiniest of publications, but the pennies paid out to personal publishers felt more like an insult than an exciting new revenue stream. Wordpress.com, however, offered a slick-looking and easy-to-use platform for anyone’s thoughts. For a public used to Geocities it was a revolution.
Webby list: Wikipedia launches
Alternative: Wikipedia compared favourably to Encyclopedia Britannica
Wikipedia, despite being a miracle of collaborative working, was still the butt of quite a few jokes about accuracy until Nature, the science journal, carried out a survey that compared its science coverage to that of the highly-respected Encyclopedia Britannica, and found very little difference between the two. The Wikipedians had a club to beat traditional reference works with that they’ve been using very effectively ever since.
Webby list: Napster shut down
Alternative: iTunes Music Store opens
Napster, a peer-to-peer music sharing service, was enormously popular as a way to download pirate copies of records. Its closure, forced by a lawsuit brought by the Recording Industry Association of America [RIAA], however, is not a significant event in the development of music online. It was only one of many such services and another would have stepped forward to take its place had it not been for the development of credible legal alternatives such as iTunes.
Webby list: Google IPO
Alternative: Dotcom crash
It’s hard to argue with the significance of Google’s public offering as it’s funded the development of one of the internet’s dominant forces, but it pales into nothing compared with the financial earthquake that occurred in the first two years of the decade. Not only did it weed out a large number of untenable enterprises with no real business plan but also, in conjunction with the oppressive Sarbanes-Oxley legislation in the US that makes it very expensive to administer a public company, it re-shaped the model of growth for hopeful technology companies. In the nineties they launched and desperately built a user base so they could float themselves for a fortune based on hypothetical future earnings. Now they launch and desperately build a user base in the hope of attracting venture capital money and eventually being bought by Google.
Webby list: online video revolution
Alternative: the BBC launches iPlayer
YouTube, Vimeo and the rest have brought video into the range of media offered online in a way that was all but impossible before. Now individuals and small enterprises have a ready-made free platform that has allowed an explosion in the range of output. At the top of the tree, however, remains the BBC. Where YouTube brought public accessibility, the iPlayer made your PC not only a web browsing terminal but also a television, radio and on-demand video service for high quality professional content, raising the bar and forcing the other broadcasters online.
Webby list: Facebook opens to non-students and Twitter takes off
Alternative: MySpace collapses
MySpace was the place to go to build a personal profile online, promote your band, connect with your friends and generally hang out if you were a teenager a few years ago. A Rupert Murdoch acquisition, some missed traffic targets and the combined rises of Facebook, Twitter and Bebo later and it’s a crumbling geriatric giant. Others might well step in to take its place but they’ll never look as unassailable as MySpace once did, so their shareholders will never feel quite as safe.
Webby list: the iPhone debuts
Alternative: Google Android debuts
The iPhone is the best mobile phone on the market. It’s a joy to use, so its many customers enjoy a world of web browsing, mobile email and apps that they might well never have used otherwise. Like most Apple products though, it’s aimed at the upper end of the market so it’s unlikely to become a mass-market device, so we could easily see a world in which iPhone users do a great variety of things but everyone else, stuck on Symbian or Windows Mobile, stick with just making calls. Android, being open source, lowers the cost of entry for handset manufacturers wishing to increase the functions available on their phones to almost nothing and brings affordable, useable smartphones within reach of a huge number of people.
Webby list: US presidential campaign
Alternative: rise of the blogs
The Webbys celebrate the presidential candidates for their use of social media when it was the online donation mechanisms that really changed the game, but that’s not why I’m suggesting an alternative. Politics had already been online for years before Obama declared his intention to run in an online video, but the politicians hadn’t realised. 2008 was just when they started pedalling, trying to catch up.
Webby list: Iranian elections on Twitter
Alternative: #trafigura on Twitter
As Turi Menthe of Demotix.com, the citizen journalism agency, pointed out at the time, Twitter self-selects a wealthy, educated middle class who will already be aware of the political problems in their country, so it has an inherent bias and might not accurately reflect the feelings of the whole Iranian community. When legal firm Carter-Ruck applied for an injunction to prevent the Guardian reporting on a question being asked in parliament about the activity of Trafigura, a commodities trading company accused of dumping toxic waste on the Ivory Coast, however, practical results ensued. Thousands of twitterers erupted in an orgy of linking to the relevant information. A search for Trafigura turned up the Guardian’s article on the injunction, despite the name never being mentioned in the piece. The crowd had overturned the power of the court and Trafigura had little choice but to drop the action. Freedom of speech was restored in a morning. ( .telegraph.co.uk )
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