Tapping Collective Intelligence

2014-5-19 // by The Webbys

In November of 2000, NASA did something unusual: it asked amateurs to help it map the surface of Mars. The agency set up a Web site called Clickworkers, where people could take a short tutorial on how to classify Martian craters and then get to work clicking on photos of Mars. NASA then aggregated all those clicks to come up with… Read more ›

Happy Birthday Web

2014-5-18 // by The Webbys

Cenk Uygur, Dave Rubin and other commentators from The Young Turks revisit coverage of the Web and Internet to give special thanks to these revolutionary technologies.… Read more ›

The Global Rich List

2014-5-17 // by The Webbys

Global Rich List is an interactive project created by agency Poke London to draw attention to the distorted view of wealth in the Western world. Visitors enter their income with expectations that are often shattered when it’s revealed how well off they are in relation to the rest of the globe. … Read more ›

Everyone Is Empowered to Create and Share

2014-5-16 // by The Webbys

We live in an age of universal creation and co-creation – one where technology is both an afterthought and ever-present. We optimists can’t help but be excited by the possibilities for anyone to lend his or her voice to the global dialog, to make contact with others across the world, and to develop unique content, products, and experiences. Compared with… Read more ›

The FCC Wishes The World Wide Web A Happy 25th Birthday

2014-5-15 // by The Webbys

In honor of the World Wide Web’s 25th birthday, we here at the FCC are happy to celebrate our support of service providers such as Comcast and Time-Warner. Let’s not let “net neutrality” get in the way of user experience- we want to make it fast and easy for you to get to the good web sites, and… Read more ›

The Internet of Things

2014-5-14 // by The Webbys

On March 12, 1989 (25 years ago), Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper proposing an “information management” system that became the conceptual and architectural structure for the Web. He eventually released the code for his system—for free—to the world on Christmas Day in 1990. It became a milestone in easing the way for ordinary people to access documents and interact over a network… Read more ›

The Web in Alphabetical Order

2014-5-13 // by The Webbys

The Web in Alphabetical Order According to ICANN, .COM domains were intended for business, .ORG for nonprofit, and .NET for internet providers and “Web Portals.” Internet Directory is a listing of every domain—beginning with the 115 million .COMs—as they stand in early 2014. On a fast browser (Chrome or Safari), it takes 599 days to watch every domain scroll by. Surprises… Read more ›

The Greatest Serendipity Engine in History

2014-5-12 // by The Webbys

The Web has been described as the greatest serendipity engine in history. With a few clicks, it can take us from a site about Britney Spears to a post about monarch butterflies via peanut butter cookie recipes, BBC Radio 4’s Friday Night Comedy and an essay about Karl Marx. Never before have we had such an abundance of diverse information… Read more ›

The Invention of The Emoticon

2014-5-11 // by The Webbys

With the invention of the Web came an influx of written correspondence. And, as anyone who has tried to convey sarcasm online can attest, tone can easily get lost between the lines of an email. That’s why in 1982 computer scientist Scott Fahlman invented the emoticon. His invention actually predates the Web: The above suggestion was posted on a message… Read more ›

Free Rice and Crowdsourcing Social Change

2014-5-10 // by The Webbys

The Web is an invention that has given us infinite possibilities to connect with one another and collectively work toward social change. With that in mind, the founders of Freerice.com launched their site on October 7, 2007, with the intention to feed the world’s hungry. Visitors play a trivia game that donates rice for ever correct answer. In its first… Read more ›

ground.alt

2014-5-9 // by The Webbys

ground.alt was created by visual artist, Ryoichi Kurokawa using digital reconstructions of images and audio recorded by journalist and filmmaker Daniel Demoustier over the last dozen years in the Middle East. Three images depict the different viewpoints of situations which are involved in conflict and war. The Web provides a medium through which people can get an inside look… Read more ›

What is the Web?

2014-5-8 // by The Webbys

“How is the World Wide Web different from the Internet? Does it matter? And why does thinking about the web as an ‘ocean’ make so much sense?” Michael Stevens is the creator of Vsauce… Read more ›

World Wide Weird

2014-5-7 // by The Webbys

I’m a collector of unpopular culture. Since I was a teenager, I’ve been attracted to the fringes of art, literature, music, science, and technology. I grew up hanging around alternative record stores, dialing into underground Bulletin Board Systems, trading photocopied ‘zines, scouring used book stores, watching third generation dupes of psychotronic films, and researching anomalous phenomena at the… Read more ›

Banner Art

2014-5-6 // by The Webbys

Banner ads have been an important part of the internet and its expansion, but nowadays people ignore and even wants to block them by using “ad blocking” programs. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Web, we wanted to give these poor things a chance to become a star, by transforming them into something fun & beautiful. We used the… Read more ›

The First Web, and Beyond

2014-5-5 // by The Webbys

Web Crawlers A Web crawler is a bot that, starting with a list of one or more Websites (seed), downloads them and adds all their links to the same list, and continues downloading and adding links, probably without encountering any limit (Websites are created faster than a bot’s speed). Crawlers are exploration algorithms that start in tiny regions of… Read more ›

The First Kickstarter Project

2014-5-3 // by The Webbys

Before crowdfunding was officially “a thing,” this project was fully backed for $35 on May 3, 2009 — the first successful Kickstarter ever. In a few short years, the platform has led the charge in changing the way we invest in and support projects. In 2013 alone, $380 million was pledged to back Kickstarters, just one of many reasons why they’re the 2014 Webby Breakout of… Read more ›

#TWWAF - That Which We All Fear

2014-5-2 // by The Webbys

A sensory deprivation cinema experiment. This site explores the way in which we as people physically interact with different types of film. Specifically those reactions that include scenes of horror. By using a visitors webcam and face-detection technology to deliver content based on whether or not the visitor’s face is in view or obscured. When the visitor’s face… Read more ›

The Innovators

2014-5-1 // by The Webbys

An exclusive unpublished excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s book The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Available October 7, 2014. As the Web was taking off in 1993, I was the editor of new media for Time Inc., in charge of the magazine company’s Internet strategy. In previous years, we had made deals with… Read more ›