Wooden Rocket Awards

The SF Crowsnest, which claims to be "Europe's most visited science fiction site," is giving an award called the Wooden Rocket Award for best speculative-fiction website.

It's a little goofy in some ways; for example, they claim to be, unlike all those other awards, a people's award:

Unlike other awards where voting is done by a cabal of genre insiders, the Wooden Rockets are voted for by the people that count. YOU. The science fiction and fantasy fans of the world wide web.

Uh, so the Hugos are voted on by a cabal of genre insiders? Most of the major awards are voted on by members of a given organization or subscribers of a given magazine, and this one's no exception: you have to have been a subscriber to their free magazine for two issues by June 2003 to vote.

But that aside, it might be an interesting award, and they do have a variety of reasonably good categories. (As usual, though, there's no category for standalone works like The Spiders or that Bill Gates memorial site or Cloudmakers.)

If you're looking for things to nominate, you might wander through that list of SF on the Web we did for WorldCon. The Crowsnest site also has a directory of sites; if you look at the rules for each category, you can click to view a (non-comprehensive) listing of some sites you could vote for in that category.

The voting system is a little limited, btw. I gather that your nomination is your vote, and you can only nominate one item in each category, and whichever item gets the most votes wins. It doesn't appear that there will be separate nomination and voting rounds.

Also note that if a site receives too high a percentage of votes from free email addresses, it will be silently disqualified. So if you have multiple email addresses and one of them is a non-free account, vote from that one. (I hope nobody will use this rule to intentionally disqualify competition by voting for it from lots of free addresses. This seems like a flaw in the rules to me.)

They've avoided the thorny question of what constitutes a site by only considering whatever's at the top-level domain name (for sites with their own domains). Thus, for example, Sci Fiction won't be eligible as a magazine in its own right, which seems unfortunate; it would be eligible only as part of the scifi.com domain, and there doesn't seem to be a category that that kind of site fits into. (Though iIrc, Ellen doesn't consider Sci Fiction to be a magazine per se. But a lot of people do, and it seems odd that the highest-paying and most prestigious online market for short sf wouldn't be eligible for an award in the Best Online Magazine category. Ah, well. I suppose scifi.com as a whole could be considered a "magazine" of a sort, but that's kind of a stretch imo.)

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