Philippine Webby Awards: Irrelevant?
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Technogra.ph recenly posted the Plagiarism incident by one Philippine Web Award winner. Because of the controversy, the winner was disqualified and the runner-up was given the trophy.
Doing some internet research, I found an old plagiarism complaint to the Philippine Webby Awards. An email was sent back in 2001 by a Mr. Balboa to Philippine Webby complaining about Inq7.net:
Dear Mr. Heinz Bulos:
Thank you for your response rendered useless by its
tardiness.What a sorry sight. I provided you the URL of the
OFW-News article, Mr. William Esposo’s source, which
was http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OFW-News/message/62.
If you had enough courtesy and diligence to follow
the link, you would have read that document which
rightfully names R Balboa as the author of the trivia
lifted by the Inq7 columnist. He maliciously deleted
my name and freely copied everything, word for word,
and passed off the trivia as his “excerpts.” Since
you uncivilizedly disregarded that part of my letter
and unethically went on to present one of your 2001
awards to Inq7, the public should now begin to
question the credibility and prestige of the
Philippine Web Awards (PWA). As this clearly shows
that you condone electronic theft, Internet surfers
and other people would get sick if they discovered
that the ‘P’ in your PWA stands for plagiarism.
This brings a question. Is the Philippine Webby Awards still relevant? Do people still care about this? Is there real value in being awarded by a body that is getting a controversial reputation?
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Comments
i believe that it is irrelevant, but more so because there just aren’t enough entries. for this year’s celebrities category for example, there were a whopping 3 entries. 3. how can you be proud of winning when there’s such little competition to begin with? unlike international awards programs such as the original webbys, making it to the elimination round is an accomplishment in itself simply because you know you were up against elite competition. not so in the pwa. and with all the corruption people have been pointing out (some of which are quite blatant) as well as the committee’s obvious lack of professionalism and organization, i believe that the pwa, in its current state, is meaningless.
I actually submitted an old website of mine (www.subicbay.com.ph) a few years ago, and it supposedly went through the rigors of screening and shortlisting. By the way, you need to pay big bucks to get entered into the webby’s. I seem to recall feeling a bit “cheated” because I felt my site was not given its due. The criteria was there, but the manner in which the criteria was used properly by the judges…I seem to have lost track of how it was implemented. I just remember feeling that there was not enough explanation as to why other sites, and some obviously crappy at that, made it to the finals, and not mine. It was just a simple “you made it” or “you didn’t make it”, as I recall.
Since then, I have stopped joining and stopped supporting their endeavors.
I have had my share of being plagiarized as well, in fact more of an intellectual property issue. I had a concept for a business matching engine which we presented to a company somehow associated with the organizers of the webby’s, and they went ahead and implemented it on their own. They did fail at it, though. Water under the bridge.
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