A small team of us won a Neal Award back in 1996 for a pretty cool feature we did on streaming audio technologies at Macworld. We got Les Claypool to license a track that we encoded using both Macromedia's Shockwave and RealAudio's formats. Then we created an interactive test lab, a page with all the samples using all the codecs and playback rates. You could play each sample and then vote for your preference from that page. We also wrote a how-to on setting up streaming audio and built a table of streaming audio vendor comparisons. You can still see what's left of that feature in the Internet Archive.
I don't remember how many people worked on that piece, but the one thing I do remember thinking at the time was that this was an expensive project that would have a short life span on the Macworld.com home page.
InfoWorld's product tests aren't cheap, either. The research involved in doing performance analysis on big ethernet switches or anti-spam tools or business intelligence packages is not for the lighthearted. Add in a requirement to post to an InfoWorld blog regularly, and your typical InfoWorld editor is now earning his salary through blood sweat and tears.
Anyhow, I'd like to think I had at least a small part in helping InfoWorld get into the nomination circle. Of course, everyone knows the man behind the curtain there is Jon Udell. Just this week he blew me away with yet another breakthrough with his Metadata Explorer...always on the hunt for ways to make existing technologies more powerful.
Hope you win the top prize, guys!
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