Switched alerts us that the 2010 Webby Award nominees have been announced, with five nominees each in a baffling 70 categories for “websites,” 17 categories for “interactive advertising,” 26 categories for “online film and video,” and 9 categories for “mobile.” We’re talking 610 nominations total.
It’s a vast, vast field, and you can scope it out by going to the Webby Awards website. Thereafter, you can vote at AOL’s Webby voting page.
Some of the nominees include usual suspects (TED.com got four nominations, and Wired and The Onion did well too), obscurer talents (Nokia ViNe for “Best Use of GPS or Location Technology”), and a few champions of all that is good and that is right (“The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody“).
Even a little Tumbl-blog exclusively featuring pictures of Tom Selleck, waterfalls, and assorted sandwiches got a nod:
That’s right: Viral darling of yestermonth Selleck Waterfall Sandwich was nominated for Best Website – Weird, competing with the likes of Awkward Family Photos, Cute Overload, and Cheezburger Network’s FAIL blog and I Can Has Cheezburger?
As appealing as awkward family photos, cute animals, acts of epic failure, and amusingly captioned cats are, respectively, our dog in this fight is with Selleck Waterfall Sandwich. Yes, the site may have misstepped when it tried to game its readership into voting for an SWS Threadless t-shirt design. But the overuse of the words “awkward” and “fail” doom Awkward Family Photos and FAIL Blog; I Can Has Cheezburger has seen its day (they’ve got the #6 cat book on Amazon.com), and cute animals aren’t sufficiently “weird,” IMO.
This leaves, by default, Selleck Waterfall Sandwich, which is not only a bona fide homegrown, grassroots viral phenomenon, unlike the outputs of the monolithic Cheezburger Network, but which is so stupidly niche and yet so calculatingly aimed at the belly of the Internet’s collective sensibilities that it deserves a prize for something, and it might as well be a Webby.
You can vote here.
Links:
(h/t Switched)
