I was at the [Hitwise Singapore](http://sg.hitwise.com/) Online Performance Awards 2008 this evening. When I arrived at the venue, Indochine, surprisingly it wasn’t as packed as it was last year. It seems that one of the main taxi operator’s websites went down and people couldn’t book cabs. I joked to Hitwise’s boss that maybe next year that taxi site would win a Hitwise award!
Anyway. I’m sure the results will be announced on the Hitwise website eventually, but here’s what I can remember:
Of the web giants, Yahoo! dominated the awards, winning for most popular email service and messenger service. They also won for Finance and some other categories.
Google won at least 2 prizes – naturally for search. They were pretty loud cheerers!
I didn’t hear a peep out of Microsoft. I thought they might have had a chance with MSN Messenger, but surprisingly Singaporeans seem to prefer Yahoo!
One of our vendors, [Convertium](http://www.convertium.com/), won best IT site…again. Another of their projects, [Visitsingapore.com](http://www.visitsingapore.com/), also won in the tourism category. Congrats, guys!
Our very own [HPB](http://www.hpb.gov.sg/) didn’t win in the Health category, but I know we did top the charts for a month or more, as Hitwise had notified us of it. We don’t have any services that people MUST come to, for instance to register for licences or other things they can’t do without. So we have to continue pulling visitors to our site through other means.
There were some surprising figures. Not all players who dominated their markets, won online. The most popular local telecoms site was not SingTel, but [M1](http://www.m1.com.sg/). To be fair, SingTel won in other categories with sites like [Singtelshop.com](http://singtelshop.com/). And the most popular political site was the [Singapore Democrat](http://www.singaporedemocrat.org/)’s. Not everyone came to collect their awards.
[Xiaxue](http://xiaxue.blogspot.com/), as usual, won as the most popular local blog. I wish Hitwise’s suave-looking new Singapore and HK Country Manager had pronounced her name properly. It sounded like “Seeeaaah Suuuehhh”.
[More photos here.](http://www.flickr.com/photos/vantan/sets/72157604368613610/)