Rediff Bags Top Honours At Chip Dishnet Awards

Horizontal portal rediff.com walked away with top honours at the CHIP Dishnet DSL Web Awards 2000 held here yesterday. Rediff was judged the best Net Media Site in the Judges Award category, and the best multi-lingual site as well as the site with the best search engine in the Popular Choice Awards category.

The awards were organised by personal computing magazine CHIP of the Jasubhai group in collaboration with broadband Internet service provider Dishnet DSL.

The awards received nominations from over 1000 dotcoms, of which 50 were short-listed by a panel of experts across 10 categories with 2 awards in each of these i.e. the Judges Award and the Popular Choice Award.

 

The sites were judged across stringent parameters by a high-level panel of judges comprising eminent personalities from the infotech (IT) industry, the

entertainment world and the media and creative world.

Of the 20 awards that were announced, batchmates.com won both the Judges and the Popular Choice Awards in the Special Interest & Hobbies category.

Jarkko Oikarinen, the Finland-based founder of Internet Relay Chat, the technology that enables chatting on the web, gave away the awards.

"The level of interest in the web in India is astounding. Finland may be among the most

networked societies in the world, but here in India I see an excitement in the faces of the people the minute one utters the word Internet. Everyone, I have met from the person on the street to the industry leaders, everyone is fully charged. One can almost feel the Net revolution here on the streets of Mumbai," he said.

Interestingly, except for batchmates.com, no website won both the Judges Choice and the Popular Choice awards in any category. For instance, while vindia.com was awarded the best entertainment site as a Judges Choice, the Popular Choice award in this category went to hungama.com. Similarly, indiatimes.com won the Popular Choice award for the best Net Media site.