Full Circle Associates

Are Webby judges qualified? . As a webby judge who has NO CLUE how I got to be one other than a mysterious email, I think it's a good question. Steve Johnson did a little research.

These people, drawn from the creme-de-la-creme of digital society, are those who will judge the merit of the Web sites nominated for Webby Awards....how many of these 500 cyber-luminaries maintain active Web presences? How many have let their sites fall behind into disuse and abandonment? How can a pot call a kettle black?

I'm not saying that you have to run a good Web site to be able to judge the sites of others (after all, most rock critics can barely play guitar or sing a note). But one would expect a modicum of basic Web competence among 'those individuals who have catalyzed great achievements on the Internet, demonstrated extraordinary talent in a traditional medium, or who possess in-depth knowledge of new media and comprehensive familiarity with a broad range of sites within a category.'

That means, at least to me, that one of the key qualifications of being a Webby Judge is or should be that one has built an active Web presence...

Note: I define 'active Web presence' very liberally... All I ask is for each Judge to have some kind of active Web page to indicate who they are, what they do, and how to reach them via email. This can be a personal home page, a bio page on a working site, or a Weblog: anything that demonstrates that a given Webby Judge has been interested enough in the Web to have staked out some kind of claim, however modest, in the last ten years.

When he crunched the numbers, Steve found the following:

Webby Judges Possibly Fit to Judge Because they have Active Web Presences: 345 (71 percent)

Webby Judges Whose Judgment Should be Questioned Because Their Pages Are Out of Date:
52 (11 percent)

Webby Judges Unfit To Judge Anyone With a Web Page Because They Have No Credible Web Presences of Their Own: 90 (17 percent)

Dang, I'm glad I have a blog.