Awards co-presenter Bonnie Fuller
TechWeb's Internet Evolution team (photos by Yumiko Tsukada)
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Winner - Consumer: BusinessWeek for Business Exchange
 In creating a personal information manager with social media chops, BusinessWeek mashed up two of the greatest strengths of digital technology into one of the most innovative online products of the year. At the Business Exchange, registered users can accumulate their online research, whether it is a link to an article, a white paper, a video or just a destination from anywhere on the Web. But it is also a social network of other people’s similar collections heavily indexed and parsed into niche content categories. Need to find out about mobile search? BusinessExchange not only aggregates some of the best material from around the Internet but shows you who else is most interested in the topic. Every topic page becomes a niche publication and social network filled with blogs, articles and like-minded researchers whose research you can explore as well. The site pulls in bloggers from Federated Media’s star stable (Henry Blodgett, John Battelle, et. al.) who become collector/contributors of topic pages. As a charter member of LinkedIn’s new partnership programs, BusinessWeek Online lets its common users migrate network profile information from the popular service into Business Exchange. The innovations here have not been lost on advertisers who see in this site a new way to leverage the vitality of social networking within the safe havens of editorial control. Business Exchange carves a new path for branded media as a host for research and information sharing.
Winner – b2b: Hanley Wood Business Media for EcoHome
Sometime clean and simple design not only benefits readers—it embodies the brand. For its new EcoHome magazine launch, Hanley Wood created a complementary site that embodies the print monthly in look, feel, content and spirit. Visually open, with generous white space and clean labels that reflect the print design, the site clusters Web-only content around a digital version of the print book. A straightforward intellectual architecture drives the user towards key content categories (News, Products, Design Events). The site is designed in a tiered fashion, with news on top, trends below and case studies below that. The site visually organizes information with the kind of efficiency you would expect from an eco-conscious pub, and so it communicates its brand with every page. The site moves beyond static content by recognizing its readers and their sociability at every turn. A Flash-based poll tool on page one registers votes, results and comments on the spot. The brand’s presence on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is featured on page one, and on each of these remote locations EcoHome adds specific new value and retains a familiar face. Hanley Wood has created a site that embodies the magazine’s core values: efficiency, eco-friendliness, homeyness.
Honorable Mentions:
Advanstar Communications for DVM360.com: DVM360.com came into an underserved veterinary market and soon attracted over 80,000 unique users with its blend of news and content from a series of print publications. Advertisers from the segment that never marketed online before soon followed suit.
American Institute of Certified Public Accountants for Feed the Pig PSA: The “FeedthePig.org” campaign was ahead of the donward curve last year in targeting a new generation of career builders with a message that was long overdue—learn to save. The site gave young people tangible tools to help them change saving and spending behavior…before they end up as indebted as their parents.
Bon Appetit magazine for Bonappetit.com: Bon Appetit adds an editorial filter to an online category that seems obsessed with the sheer tonnage of recipes it can offer. The clean editorial blocks surface foodie topics and, yes, recipes that its audience’s more cultivated palettes appreciate. The best dishes use the simplest, natural ingredients, and so does information architecture.
ecomii.com for www.ecomii.com: The hype over “going green” and buying into “green” products needs a fact checker, and ecomii.com filled that bill last year. With practical advice on going green in everyday life and checks on the environmental claims of products and services, the site effectively targets an emerging question: Does this really help?
Gourmet for gourmet.com: Food as an adventure. The magazine combines a novel top-line navigation system that drills into a vault of diverse content. At the same time its colorful front page gets us salivating over the magazine’s signature combination of recipes and technique.
Turner for The Frisky: A veteran of Maxim and Rolling Stone leads a randy online team that offers women a fun and undeniably sexy destination. The site uses voice and tons of ’tude to hash over the hot topics, star turns and romantic entanglements that its 18-34-year-old female audience loves to dish over.
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