Oman Web Awards 2005
Oman Web Awards 2005 was held on December 28th – No, wait a second, their website actually had the date wrong, the event was in fact held on the 30th of December and nobody ever changed, or even noticed, the error on their schedule page. Add to that the fact that they never replied to the email I sent them to confirm the date.
Contestants had to pay 40 Omani Riyals (Around $100) just to enter the competition. Unfortunate people that applied to a category that did not receive another two entrants would have had their application scrapped and nobody knows what happens to the money. The whole thing is now finished and we do not know if there is anyone that actually had this happen to him/her. Nobody knows ‘WHY’ applicants had to pay the entry fee, and nobody knows what actually what it was used for. The event was sponsored by some of the biggest corporates in Oman including Omantel, Bank Muscat, PDO, Oman Newspaper, Bank Dofar, NBO, MHD, Oman Cables and Fincorp. There were NO PRIZES for the winners of the event other than a 30 cm trophy – the one we got (Silver Award) was broken.
Each contestant was given ONE SINGLE TICKET to the dinner event at the Al-Bustan Palace. I think that almost every single applicant called back asking if more than one person could attend the event, the organisers replied saying no, we offered to pay the fees for another application just to get another ticket, and they said no. We still decided to go as a duo, with or without tickets, the ticket we had did not have a seat number, there was no visible serial number on it either, and just as expected, nobody checked for tickets.
There were about 70 contestants divided into 16 categories, some of which made sense, and many other did not. The funnies of all was the ‘entertainment category’ which featured the websites of the restaurant ‘Golden Oryx‘ competing against Oman’s sports portal ‘Sports Oman‘! That’s exactly what I call relevant comparison.
The most horrible of errors was the replacement of the website’s name with that of the person that filled the form – we experienced this personally as our website’s name was never mentioned ANYWHERE as it was replaced with the name of the website member that went to fill in the forms. His name has been cited as the website’s name everywhere, even on the trophy itself. This happened to the majority of the non-corporate applicants, the worst that I can think of is the website of some school that was labeled as ‘Khadeja Khalfan Al-Harthy’. Well, at least Khadeja had here name spelt properly, our website had the the wrong spelling for both the FIRST and the LAST name of the person that filled it.
The error I highlighted earlier might sound like a silly error that I am bitching about for no good reason, but it is not. This was a FATAL error for those of us that only contributed in this for the sake of having some publicity for our websites. The fact that we did not have our website ‘named’ has almost made our participation in this thing almost completely pointless. Our website name was never ‘mentioned’ in the celebration and was never written in the newspapers that wrote something about the event as our website’s name was replaced with the name of the person that filled the application. Nobody knows if the website of the awards will ever be updated with ‘LINKS’ the websites of the winners. We do not know if we gained a single extra visit as a result of winning (?) an award at the Oman Web Awards. We did not get any monetary prize. If you think about it, it is actually sad.
I am not really sure if I could say anything more about this ‘event’. The show was lame, seriously. The presenter did not know how to pronounce the word ‘category’ (Catigri?). And worst of all, the judgment process had no sense of transparency. There were ‘claimed’ criteria for picking up the winners, but nobody knows anything about these. During the event, the presentation of the winners was just like a quick break of the food and the dancing, the winners were just announced in order, without any explanation on what makes these website better than everybody else. NOT EVEN THE TOP WINNER. Seriously, there was NOTHING in the show, other than just this person won the 3rd place, the other person the 2nd place, and the first place went to this person. Category after another and the prizes went down. The fact that the audience rarely clapped made it even worse. I cannot believe that one of the opening speeches actually mentioned the word ‘Oscar’ in it.
We hope that our qualification for the PAN awards would actually be worth something.
Update: The Oman Web Awards 2006
