March 26, 2001

Oscars Schmoscars, We Won the REAL Award
   by stacy <pfftnet@stacy.pfft.net>

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Last night I watched some of the 73rd Annual Academy Awards presentation. Gladiator, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Traffic all did well. Julia Roberts won best actress, finally. Russell Crowe, the guy Meg Ryan slept with, won best actor. Yawn. What I was really thinking was, "Big deal, we won a Wappy!"

You may wonder what a Wappy is. A Wappy is the award given by Cellmania for outstanding WAP sites that can be viewed from a wireless device such as a cellular phone. We won in the Youth Interest category. I think it's fairly obvious that this is not a youth-oriented site, but who cares?? They liked us so much they had to push it for us to fit in any of their categories, but good enough for me, we won!

We first learned about this at a Wired story that originally said we were a French site. We straightened them out, and they apparently fixed it, but it made me wonder which blind intern was assigned research on that story. And now Cellmania has the winners on their website, but they still haven't officially notified us that we have won this illustrious award, but that's not stopping us from telling all of you wonderful readers about it.

Actually, the PFFT! in this story goes to me. Months ago when the publisher/site developer decided it would be cool to have this site optimized for Palm and WAP devices, I thought it was a little silly. He was very particular about what HTML could be used in stories to make it compatible across all the devices. I told him it was a waste of time, but he was determined to do this. Since then, it's apparently a very good WAP site (as far as WAP sites go, since it's a widely-held opinion that you can only do so much with a protocol that sucks) and we've received praises from many different places. This is the best though, and I'm very proud of PFFT.net for what we've accomplished. Maybe this time next year, we'll win a Webby, then the Emmy, then the Oscar.

Published: March 26, 2001
Editor: stacy