Judging was blind except in the category for Writing with Hyperlinks, where the judges saw the original sites as submitted. In the other categories, the judges received all the entries relayed via email but without the name, email address or site of the submitting writer. After the entries were winnowed down to a top five, the judges for each group ranked the top five. If any piece had four out of five number 1 picks, it won the category. If not, there was a run-off between the top two scoring entries per category. Then the same process was applied to the four winners to determine a Grand prize. Whew. What a lot of work!

Just who were these hard-working judges?

Carol Adair is an English professor at the College of Marin. She lives in Fairfax with her long time partner, Kay Ryan, with dozens of fish and a varying batch of cats and, often, with any one of their extended family. The family includes children, grandchildren, adopted children, and friends. She is a runner, bicyclist, camper, and outdoors person who also reads.

Jim Ausman has been goofing around on the internet since 1989 and has seen a lot of bad conversational posts in that time. He spends his time haunting South Park new media companies, when not volunteering as an Editor at the magazine Anything That Moves.

Linda Dyer has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College, and has been the recipient of creative fellowships from the Colorado Council on the Arts, the NeoData Endowment for the Humanities, and the Vermont Studio Center; her poems have appeared recently in The Marlboro Review and Mudfish, and are forthcoming in the online 'zine CRANIA.

Joe Flower is the principal of the Change Project, for which he speaks, writes and consults. He also co-authored Age Wave and authored Prince of the Magic Kingdom: Michael Eisner and the Re-Making of Disney. He is one of three co-hosts of the Writers conference.

Emily J. Gertz is a web designer/producer/online conference host by day, and an artist and photographer by night. A native New Yorker currently living in Portland, Ore., she no longer speaks fast enough for easterners, or slow enough for northwesterners, and is resigned to bicoastal anxiety. She writes regularly for the Portland arts and culture monthly, Anodyne.

Jennifer Powell has spent her life as an activist and artist, a publisher of radical literature and purchaser of natural food products. She now lives and writes in Westminster, Colorado, and watches prairie dogs in her spare time.

Steve Silberman
Winner of Online Journalism category and the $500 Grand Prize

Steve Silberman is the senior culture writer for Wired News, and a contributing writer for Wired magazine. His articles and interviews appear twice a week on Wired News. Steve's writings on culture and community, digital technology, the Internet, music, and the writers of the Beat Generation have appeared in Time Digital, Rolling Stone, the Whole Earth Review, Net Guide, Sierra, the San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other national and Web-based publications. In 1994, Steve co-authored Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads (Doubleday) with David Shenk. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Christy Sheffield Sanford
Winner of Best Writing With Links category

Christy Sheffield Sanford has published seven books and received eight grants, including two from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work appears in North America Review, Five Fingers Review, Exquisite Corpse and other magazines, and she has been anthologized in collections such as Coffeehouse: Writings from the Web, edited by Levi Asher and Christian Crumlish. She is widely published on the Internet. Christy lives in Florida.

Miriam Zellnik
Winner of Best Online Fiction category

Miriam Zellnik writes a Cyber Culture column for Anodyne, a magazine based in Portland, Oregon, where she lives. She has been writing for the Internet since 1994 and her online writing credits include a literary magazine and feature articles for CitySearch.com. Miriam is a also a Dinner Theatre Mystery playwright and has had one-acts produced in New York and Philadelphia.

Donna deMedicis
Winner of Best Conversational Post category

Donna deMedicis writes a monthly column for Women Online Worldwide. She recently finished her first novel. She says, "The Internet has had a tremendous impact on my writing, mainly because I do not have to find stamps. I love the spontaneity of it. I love the immediate feedback. I love the fact that I am able to instantly connect with the world from my teeny little town in South Carolina. To be perfectly honest, the majority of the world has not, at present, availed itself of the opportunity to read my work, but I feel that more of the world will get on board during 1999."