You win some...

Friday, June 13th, 2003

So Jeremy and I went along to the Virtual Festival Web Awards in Brighton last night - and guess what! I didn’t win. Ah well. As they say at the Oscars: it was nice just to be nominated.

The ceremony itself was very crowded, somewhat chaotic and held in a sweltering room at the Sussex Arts Club. To be honest, I was a tiny bit disappointed - not that I didn’t win, but that the entire category of “Personal sites and weblogs” was treated with a bit of a snicker, as if blogs were nothing more than minor curios produced by odd little people with no real lives to speak of (something along the lines of, “Oh look, they write stuff about themselves and put it online, just for the heck of it! Isn’t that funny?”). Well, perhaps blogs are nothing more than minor curios, but my sensitive blogging soul was maybe a tiny bit hurt by the dismissive attitude. So, being a blogger, I figured I’d whine about it online.

Snickering and chaos not withstanding, I give a lot of credit to the Virtual Festival people for organizing the event. It’s a nice idea and a lot of work went into it, and I hope they’re successful again next year.

As it turned out, I wound up having a really good time last night, despite not winning (and despite having had our scheduled Salter Cane concert get cancelled at the last minute). Not only did I manage to snag some nice O’Reilly stuff for Jeremy, I also got to meet fellow blogger and shorlisted nominee Richard and his girlfriend Wendy, who is a classicist and Latin teacher. After the ceremony was over, we spent the remainder of the evening talking about languages, history, travel and food - all the good things in life. It was after midnight when Jeremy and I finally trundled home (by way of the kebab shop), sans prizes but happy to have met some genuinely interesting, friendly people - and that’s better than a Web award any day.

Comments

1

Nice to meet you too Jessica. We’ll arrange some more beers sometime soon!

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