Case in point: our decision to , the online video-sharing service operated jointly by Fox and NBC. Few would contest that Hulu is a solid service that's in the past year. Few would also dispute that it's a wonderful complement to the video download service offered by Apple's iTunes Store. But does all that merit an Eddy Award? That, as it turns out, is a point of contention.

Taking the position that Hulu shouldn't have been considered for an Eddy Award is senior editor Rob Griffiths; offering up the counterpoint that Hulu deserves its trophy is Macworld.com executive editor Philip Michaels.

Amazing? Yes. Eddy worthy? No

I've used many times; it really is an amazingly well done Web site. It's fast, efficient, and lets me catch up on programs I may have missed live or failed to record on my Tivo. But at the end of the day, it's just a Web site--one that requires the tremendous assistance of a web browser like Safari, Firefox, OmniWeb, or Camino, just to function. Without a browser to present its interface, Hulu is nothing but a collection of useless code. To me, any Web site, no matter how incredible, shouldn't be eligible for an Eddy.

The Eddy awards, to my mind at least, should present products that represent the best of the best of the Mac-related marketplace, at least relative to software. Regardless of how well done a given Web site is, at the end of the day, it's still just a Web site. It will (or should) look and act the same in many versions of Windows and Linux. There is absolutely nothing that Hulu has to do--other than obeying web standards--to make their site work well on the Mac. While Hulu's developers may have a Mac in house for testing the site, they don't necessarily need any Mac programmers. In short, there's nothing at all that the fine folks at Hulu had to do to make sure their site worked on the Mac--short of making sure that it did, in fact, work on a Mac.