And the Webby Awards Nominees for This Year Are

By Doug Stanley, Tampa Tribune, Fla.

Apr. 17–For a decade now, the Webby Awards have put the spotlight on new and groundbreaking Web sites that have changed the way people work and live.

This year’s crop of nominees is no exception, highlighting the best of the Web and foreshadowing where the medium is going from here.

Nominees range from blue-chip companies to bloggers, reflecting the Web’s diversity. The winners, to be announced May 9, will walk off with awards regarded as the wired world’s equivalent of the Oscars.

Nominees for Best Practices — photo-sharing site Flickr, Google Maps, blog search engine Technorati, blog feed service Bloglines.com and Web word processor Writely.com — reflect the latest technologies and trends reshaping the Web.

Several nominees highlight the emergence of online video, including Rocketboom, a popular video blog, and Dutch site FabChannel, which offers free video from live concerts.

With six nominations, NPR.org leads the pack. Other organizations receiving multiple nominations include Google Earth, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Krups USA and the Library of Congress.

The Webbys are judged on six criteria: content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity, and overall experience.

Although voting is limited to the 500-plus members of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences — including “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, musician David Bowie and The Body Shop president Anita Roddick — the rest of us can vote in the Webbys’ People’s Voice Awards, peoplesvoice.webby awards.com, through May 5.

Since The Webby People’s Voice Awards began 10 years ago, more than 2.3 million votes have been cast.

As in previous years, some of the most creative and intriguing nominees come from the Personal Web Site category. Don’t miss 44-year-old Californian Dave Garr’s site, which he used to propose to his girlfriend. Very creative in concept and design.

Following the lead of Google and MSN, Yahoo has added free aerial and satellite imagery to its map site, maps.yahoo.com.

Yahoo’s take on digital imagery in mapping doesn’t allow users to zoom in as close as either of its competitors, but it appears to cover much more of the world than either Google or MSN.

For example, I searched each of the services for the address of my childhood home in the rural Midwest. Yahoo offered the best image of the old homestead — in color and close enough to make out the roof line. MSN’s imagery, though clear and nearly as close in, was in black and white. Google’s color imagery was of such poor resolution the house couldn’t be seen.

Nearly three of every five information security breaches during the past year at companies and other organizations were the result of human error alone, a new study says.

The Computing Technology Industry Association reports that virus and worm attacks were the most common security problem, as they have been since the inception of the annual survey four years ago.

About 40 percent of the 574 organizations participating in the survey said they had experienced at least one security attack in the past year.

The most severe security breaches were reported by large companies with 7,000 or more employees and educational institutions.

Despite the prominent role human behavior plays in security breaches, only 29 percent of the surveyed organizations said they require users to take security training.

Guess that means human error at 71 percent of the organizations contributed to the human errors that led to the security breaches.

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