lis.dom

According to yesterday's newsflash, the Dominican web site is Webby worthy. The Webby Awards are, as you might imagine, kind of like the Tonys, but for web sites. This year, in addition to the winning nominees, the judges picked about 20% of the over 4000 entries as "Webby Worthy."

According to the judging criteria,

The Academy evaluates Web sites based on six criteria: content, structure and navigation, visual design, functionality, interactivity, and overall experience.

One can only assume that they were awed by the little rotating pictures of happy Dominican students and grads and that their monitors were large enough (unlike, say, most of the monitors at Dominican) that the menus all fit on to the screen. And, for that matter, one assumes they did not happen upon the infamous GSLIS Information Center.

If you have a high-speed connection and plenty of plug-ins, the Webby winners can make for some good browsing. In February 2004, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that

• 34% of all adult Americans have access to high-speed Internet connections either at home or on the job
• 24% of all adult Americans have high-speed access at home
  

That means that 66% of Americans don't have high-speed access at home. The study further notes that "[o]nly 10% of rural Americans go online from home with high-speed connections, about one-third the rate for non-rural Americans." [Here's the full report from the Pew people.]

(And remember, none of those statistics indicate the number of Americans who don't have internet access at all. Interestingly, the only report I've been able to pull up about that so far--with, I must admit, only a modicum of searching--is six years old.)