We just announced the winners of the 2009 Webware 100. Nearly 630,000 votes were cast during the voting this year to pick the best Web 2.0 sites and services. As with the previous years' awards, there were some surprises among the expected winners.
As in previous years, Google got the most awards--this year 11 in all. And also as in previous years, the social network Gaia Online got a disproportionately large number of votes, as did the big-in-China browser, Maxthon. Justin.TV joined Maxthon and Gaia Online in the list of Webware 100 winners whose huge number of votes outstripped their sites' influence among typical Webware 100 readers.
Surprises included a few products that did not make the final list of winners. Google's Blogger didn't make the cut, for example. In fact, Google had no winners in the hotly-contested "Social & Publishing" category at all; this category got more votes, 185,000, more than any other.
Digg also didn't place in the winners' lineup this year, nor did it last year. Although a "dugg" ballot for a contest like the Webware 100 can generate a big spike in votes, our traffic charts show that these spikes don't lead to the the sustained traffic necessary to drive enough votes to win in a category.
Readers last year suggested that Webware 100 include not just products that win the popular vote, but also products chosen by the editors of Webware as the best available. We didn't want to second-guess the wisdom of our crowd, but we did nonetheless create an 11th category, Editors' Choice. In this category, you'll find some of the smaller and less-popular products in awards subcategories we created just for them, like Technical Achievment, Best Newcomer, and Best Twitter Rip-off. There's also a booby prize in our Editors' Choice: Failure to Launch. It's a tie.
See the previous years' winners: 2008 | 2007
Read more about the Webware 100.
Acknowledgment: Thanks, PollDaddy, for Webware 100 polling technology.
Webware 100 voting is now open
I'm happy to announce that we have opened the voting for the 2009 Webware 100 awards. This is our annual program in which CNET readers select the top Web 2.0 apps and services from our hand-picked list of 300 finalists.
This year--the third year we've done the Webware 100--we had about 5,000 qualifying submissions from which we selected the final 300. These are 300 very strong Web apps, spread into 10 groups of 30 each. We have a new arrangement of voting categories this year, including the important Location-based Services category for apps that provide local info, as well as mapping products. We also combined two 2008 categories, Publishing and Community, into a new category, Social and Publishing, recognizing that today, writing is a two-way activity. Publishing is, by nature, social. See all the categories.
There will ultimately be 110 Webware 100 winners this year. There's a special category that's not open to user voting: The Editors' Awards. I created this category because the popular vote isn't always enough to recognize some of the most important small or up-and-coming services. There will be 10 winners in this category, chosen by me and other Webware editors, in categories including design, most innovative business model, and so on.
All the winners will be announced on May 19.
I think it's worth noting that despite the pall of the economy, which has spelled the end of many interesting Web-based businesses, nearly all of the 2008 Webware 100 winners are still up and running. Only three (so far) have been terminated: Yahoo shut Briefcase; MotionDSP withdrew FixMyMovie and will release the function as downloadable software; and iWantSandy shut down when the app's developer took a job at Twitter. As far as I can tell, everything else is still in business.
Finally, a vote of thanks to the Webware 100 technology providers: I use Wufoo to run the nominations process. They make a great system for building online forms. Polldaddy (acquired by Automattic in 2008) supplies the voting technology for the Webware 100. Last year their system processed nearly 2 million votes without a hiccup.
Welcome to the 2009 Webware 100 awards!
They're back! Just as they did in 2007 and 2008, the 2009 Webware 100 Awards will honor the people's choice for the best Web 2.0 apps and services. Last year, nearly 2 million votes were cast to determine the most popular Web apps. This year, the apps are better and the market is even more competitive, so we expect a vigorous contest.
There are 10 categories users can vote on in the Webware 100, plus an 11th category for Webware editors' special awards. Each category will have 10 winners. The categories this year are:
- Audio and music: Music streaming and download, podcasting, audio book services, recommendation systems.
- Browsing: Tools to access online content, including browsers, start pages, RSS readers, widgets, and runtime engines
- Commerce: Retail, auctions, marketplaces, travel, event tickets, and real estate
- Communications: E-mail, chat, voice
- Infrastructure and storage: Web app platforms and tools; online storage and synchronization products
- Location-based services: Mapping, friend finders, business locators, geographic services (new category for 2009)
- Photo and video: Photo storage, sharing, and editing; video storage, playback, streaming, editing, and animation
- Productivity: Tools for work and organization
- Search and reference: Data and ways to find it; search tools and knowledge repositories like wikis
- Social and publishing: Social networking, shared online environments, content management, blogging, and micro-blogging
- Editors' awards: To be announced, but these will include awards for up-and-coming products, design, innovative use of technology, and so on.
See the previous years' winners: 2008 | 2007
Nominations are open
Nominations for 2009 Webware 100 are now open. If there's a service you think people should be voting for, nominate it now. Nominations will close on March 6. See full terms and conditions.
There's no need to nominate a site more than once, or to encourage friends to nominate a site that you have already nominated. Reserve your grassroots efforts for the voting phase, which will start after we've processed all the nominations.
All live sites that have been covered in the Webware blog so far will be automatically nominated, but if you are an official representative for a product that we've written up, please nominate your product and enter your contact information so we can contact you when necessary as the Webware 100 process progresses.
Qualifications for nomination: The service must be live by March 1, 2009. It's OK if it's in beta, but it must be an open beta. The site must be entered into 1 of our 10 user-voting categories. We reserve the right to recategorize nominations.
Once the nominations are closed, Webware editors will go over the entries, remove the non-qualifying and duplicate nominations, and make sure all services are in the correct category. Then we'll select the best services in each category for the finalist round. We'll make sure the most important, most innovative, and most useful products are selected as Webware 100 finalists.
Voting starts on March 31
Users will be able to vote on their favorite webware in each category. Voting will happen on the Webware site, and we also will distribute voting buttons and code to the finalists that they can put on their sites.
Voting will run through April. The top 10 services in each category, and the 10 additional editors' picks, will be crowned the 2009 Webware 100 on May 19.
Nominations are open now. What are your favorite Web apps and services?
IrfanView packs some mighty editing features in its tiny download.
(Credit: CNET Networks)For making color corrections, printing, managing photo albums, or any of 100 other routine image-editing tasks associated with digital photography, commercial programs like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Paint Shop Pro are great solutions. But if you just need to resize and crop your personalized South Park character image to fit on your Facebook or MySpace page, a simpler option is in order.
Luckily, there are a variety of free and easy ways to crop and resize your digital photographs. One of the quickest and easy downloads for doing so is IrfanView, a longtime favorite image viewer that has added more and more editing functionality through the years.
The tiny download weighs in at 1.24MB and literally can be installed in seconds. Once you've got it running, open the image that you want to edit and select Image > Resize/Resample to edit the size of your photo. To crop, click your cursor in the top left corner of the area you want to crop, then drag the cursor to create a rectangle. Select Edit > Crop Selection, and voila!
Another free application I've become a big fan of recently is Resizr, created by Matt Miller back in 2006. Resizr is a free online tool that lets you upload an image from your hard drive or via a URL. You can then rotate, crop, and resize your image, as well as make edits to brightness and contrast. I was impressed to recently discover that I could even adjust levels and convert PNG files to JPEGs.
Resizr's space interface holds several quick and valuable options for editing images.
(Credit: CNET Networks/CBS)What do you use to quickly resize and crop digital images? Tell me about it in the comments.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
We still might not exactly be able to define "Web 2.0," but we certainly know it when we see it. The CNET Download.com team has been gradually building a catalog of more than 2,300 editorially selected Web-based software products in categories such as Audio, Bookmarking, Security, and Social Networking.
Almost everyone uses a Web-based e-mail client like Yahoo Mail, Gmail, or Hotmail, and I know that many users are shifting from Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc to Google Docs & Spreadsheets for their basic spreadsheet needs, or for sharing documents with friends, family, and colleagues. Web-based multiplatform chat client Meebo has the potential to become the Trillian of the new generation.
Fellow CNET partner Webware.com covers the ins and outs of the Web 2.0 sphere daily, and the site has just released the winners of its second Webware 100 competition. Site users picked the winners from thousands of submissions.
There are 10 champions in each in 10 categories. Some of the names--Flickr, Last.fm, Facebook--are obvious industry leaders, but you're much less likely to be familiar with others like DeviantArt, Stardoll, or VoiceThread. Regardless the level of your Web 2.0 savviness, the Webware 100 winners are likely to provide everyone with new sites to explore or cool products to keep an eye on.
Have you tried any Web-based analogues for your favorite Windows applications? If so, which are your favorites? Do you have privacy or security concerns about online software? Tell me about them in the comments.
Be sure to read more about all of the 100 winners of the Webware.com competition and leave reviews for your favorite Web-based products on Download.com. Also, follow all of the breaking news from this year's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on Webware.com.
Social Web surfing tool Me.dium is one of the first apps ready for Internet Explorer 8 beta, which Microsoft unveiled at Mix '08 in Las Vegas Wednesday.
The browser add-on enables users to chat with each other and see which Web pages they're visiting. This release takes advantage of new WebSlices and Activities features within IE 8.
With WebSlices, users can subscribe to dynamic updates of specific parts of Web pages they visit, with new content displaying within the Me.dium sidebar.
Activities capabilities enable users to bring up maps or Web searches of highlighted text on a page. The Discovery activity offers real-time content recommendations related to the pages users are browsing. The feature maps and ranks the popularity of users' ongoing activities.
Upon Microsoft's request, the Me.dium (more here) team reportedly built the tool for IE 8 within a week.
For the sake of security, Me.dium allows stealth settings so users can hide from each other, and it shuts off at bank sites.
Users testing IE 8 can download Me.dium here. Some rival social browsing tools, however, don't require installation.
The extension, also available for Firefox, added support for IE 7 in September.
Me.dium is ready for Internet Explorer 8.
(Credit: Me.dium)
Is this the last app you'll ever need?
Last week saw the release of Flock 1.0 beta, a Firefox engine that's been built out with extensive social-networking tools. Is it a flash in the pan, taking advantage of the latest fads, or does it herald a sea change in top-tier open source software? The changes from Firefox to Flock are hardly the work of one extension. The new sidebar includes features that let users add photos to their Flickr account by dragging and dropping, creating new posts to their self-published blog on the fly, and much more.
... Read more
Who needs a pencil to track a golf game when you've got a finger? Seasoned swingers will benefit from a finger-friendly iPhone app that stores course, par, and game information. The free iGolfScorecard lays it all out in an attractive interface.
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CNET Networks)
Like many mobile apps, the simplicity here is refreshing. Bookmarking the site and creating an account are the hardest parts. Once that's ingested, you can immediately start entering course names and scores for 9-hole and 18-hole greens. iGolfScorecard tracks the par and stroke count for up to four players per game.
After the last swing, iGolfScorecard shows your overall scorecard and game statistics, including the total par and average. Once saved, you can in theory review statistics from a previous game. The scorecard I saved for my 9-hole game didn't immediately show up, which is disappointing, since the user experience up to this point had been blissfully smooth.... Read more
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
There may be an excess of social-networking sites starting up these days, but the concept seems to be a permanent fixture on the Web landscape. Whether it's MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, or your own network, people love connecting with old friends and finding new ones online.
Most social-networking occurs via Web-based software in your browser, but there are several cool downloadable tools that you can also use to connect and communicate with friends and strangers online. ... Read more
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