Launchball - almost addictive!

Two very different UK museum and gallery websites are among winners announced April 11 2008 at the annual Best of the Web awards in Montreal.

Launchball, a cutting-edge physics education web game from the Science Museum, won the best innovative website gong and the major honour of overall Best of the Web at the prestigeous awards held as part of the Museums and the Web conference.

In contrast to Launchball, My Brighton and Hove, a community website set up in 2000, won best community site and best small museum site. My Brighton and Hove is written, edited and uploaded by a large group of local enthusiasts - but with the emphasis on human scale interactions, rather than cutting edge technology.

Based in the community, built on local values and skills - My Brighton and Hove

Launchball is a massively popular webgame that centres on an addictive but simple set of challenges that involve materials, physics - and lots of online fun. Since launch in late 2007, the game's been garlanded with prizes, plaudits and lots of players logging on.

Best of the Web judges were fulsome in their remarks about the game: "...Impressive array of interactive, and very stimulating games. Superb graphics and multimedia integration...Very intelligent scripting," said one judge on the MW 2008 awards page.

"The visual design is very well done keying on strong, high-contrast colours and iconography. The interface design is simple and easy to learn," added another judge on the MW 2008 website.

"Man, I have literally played with this for hours now. Even better is the open-endedness of it all and the user contributions. I can't stop fiddling with it," said another.

My Brighton and Hove is a content-rich website produced by a growing band of community users, led by volunteer co-ordinator Jennifer Drury. It's all about sustainable use of appropriate technology, and also building networks of people who remember the past of a place - in this case, the twin cities of Brighton and Hove.

On the MW 2008 site, judges commented: "The quality of the stories sets it apart from other entries. So evocative, with many gems from multiple authors. It's had a while to stew (8 years), and it shows..." wrote one.

"Really sweet. Possibly the best of the local history/memory sites I've seen lately," said another judge.

The site is a treasure trove of different kinds of heritage, from the traditional historical approaches of oral reminiscence about past conflicts, to the recent past of the Mod era, the Grand Hotel bombing and more recently, the night club scene.

My Brighton and Hove was set up by multimedia developer Jack Latimer in the wake of an award-winning exhibition at Brighton Museum - also called My Brighton. The website is written by many local people, and is coded and uploaded by a group of volunteer workers, initially using HTML, but more recently a specially-developed content management system by Community Sites is being used.

Go further - read more from Launchball's initial team leader Mike Ellis about how the project was born.