Our annual Editors' Choice Awards always inspire passionate debate--and that's just within the Macworld offices. While our list of winners reflects the consensus of our editors, not every pick is unanimous. And sometimes those debates spill out from behind closed doors and onto the pages of Macworld.com.

Case in point: our decision to give an Eddy Award to Hulu, the online video-sharing service operated jointly by Fox and NBC. Few would contest that Hulu is a solid service that's gotten better and better 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 Hulu 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.

But really, if the Eddy awards are open to Web sites, which require a "host" program to make them work, then I don't see why we shouldn't have an entirely new assortment of winners next year. For instance, I'm going to nominate Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 for an award--it is, hand's down, the best dictation program I've ever used. What, you say it's not out for the Mac? (Yes, I know about MacSpeech, which uses Dragon's engine...but Dragon is simply amazing.)

Hulu, the Eddy award winner, as seen on Linux in Fusion, another Eddy award winner.Ah, but why should that matter? Hulu isn't really for the Mac either, is it? To use Dragon on your (Intel-powered) Mac, you just need to first install its Mac-based helper application. In this case, that'd be Fusion or Parallels, the virtualization applications. Once installed, you can then run Dragon within Windows XP Pro inside of Fusion or Parallels. What, that's cheating, you say?

How is this any different than Hulu and its required Web browser helper application? Both programs have a similar level of Mac specificity: none. In the case of Hulu, the browser does the hard work of presenting Hulu's interface to the user. In the case of Dragon, it's Fusion or Paralells that's doing the hard work. But in both cases, the end result is the same: you can use a piece of software on your Mac thanks to a native application