Most deserving online industries

Time was when competition centered on laurels like best website design, best newcomer, and suchlike. Then the online world was simple, rather easy to follow and predict.

Leapfrog to 2007. The year just gone by has seen phenomenal interest in social media. Sites like Facebook and Digg have snowballed into gigantic prominence.

Today, any Internet marketer worth his salt cannot afford to ignore the social media sites even if the so-called search engine optimization (or SEO) takes a backseat.

Keeping with the new flavors, TechCrunch’s selection of The Crunchies for 2007 presents less of surprise, but more of the pointers of tomorrow.

Here is a selective list of the awardees, citations quoted verbatim. You can see the details at this page.

1. Best Overall: Facebook > Facebook revolutionized the idea of what social networking could be.
2. Best video startup: Hulu > Hulu put television online. Their broadcasting system was modeled on the success of social video sites and drawn the praise of its previous critics.
3. Best user-generated content site: Digg > Digg’s simple voting system defined the emerging social media revolution. Getting “dugg” quickly became a badge of honor and established a coveted place in the geek lexicon.
4. Best mobile start-up: Twitter > Twitter, the new addictive microblogging platform. It wasn’t until after the South by Southwest conference that people realized the value of the incredibly simple microblogging platform.
5. Best International startup: Netvibes > Based in London, Tariq Karim and Freddy Mini’s Netvibes has made waves in the U.S. as a top personalized web portal.
6. Best design: SmugMug > SmugMug is professional photo site. SmugMug’s attention to detail and design can command as much as $150 per year from their users.
7. Best new startup: iMedix > iMedix combines search and social networking to change the way people find health information online. Users are encouraged to help each other by sharing health experiences and links from around the web.
8. Best use of viral marketing: StumbleUpon > StumbleUpon’s service lets users bookmark and discover new sites they love. With only a $1.5 million investment in 2005, StumbleUpon gew to over 4 million Stumblers and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million.