Things that make you go "Yay"

You cannot possibly have any street cred in the New Social Media without saying "Yay", "w00t" or doing things for the Lulz. Sadly too much of the stuff that passes as content is crap, and ditto the companies building "Web 2.0 applications" (or subroutines, as they were called in older days). However, 2 things I saw today were, I thought, worthy of a Yay - as in Good Guys sometime win.

Firstly, Richter Scales, those guys who took the p*ss out of Silicon Valley and Bubble 2.0, and were then hounded down by Photographatrix Lane Hartwell (see here for The Saga) were awarded a Webby. Also, I noted The Onion picked up 2 gongs.

Secondly, Rashmi Sinha's Slideshare was given $3m to build out what is quite a useful and well executed service. I met her at FOWA last year, her presentation stood out as doing something useful in a business sense, rather than so many other Web 2.0 plays dedicated to sites giving the consumers what they really, really want ( petsites and upmarket green tat if my memory serves me right). I am also in "Yay" mode because it proves my hypothesis re what B2B 2.0 will get funded is correct - ie (as I noted last year re Slideshare and a few others at FOWA 07):

The implication is in the short to medium term nearly all those startups are going to be fighting for the... ... "B2C non critical quadrant"...... - but of course this changes the economics and culture (to a more consumer style play). The premium on publicity, the leg up on TechCrunch from the morass of same-tech me-too's, will thus be immense.

By the way, all the Webby awards and nominees are on this site, its quite interesting in that there is a winner and a "people's voice" winner. I leave you to make your mind up which you'd prefer, suffice to say on this evidence, the "wisdom of crowds" (Or more likely the wisdom of lobby groups, unless their public voting software is very good at tracking repeats) is somewhat over-rated in my view.

Apparently, once the Web 2.0 bubble is over we can stop having to say "Yay" again. w00t to that, say I!