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Teenage dot com sensation sweeps Mystery Awards

Rich and sexy too

British teenage dot com sensation Benjamin Cohen has scooped a bag-full of awards celebrating his e-ntrepreneurial skills and the massive contribution he has made to the industry. He was ranked second place in the Internet Icon category behind Lastminute.com's Martha Lane Fox. He was also voted sexiest male webmaster. His portal, CyberBritain.com, was voted Web site of the year and a former concern, JewishNet.co.uk, was ranked number seven. CyberBritain.com also topped the list of best search engines of the year ahead of the likes of Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos and AltaVista. JewishNet.co.uk also walked away with the top award for a community portal. None of Cohen's Web sites featured in the category of top ten e-commerce British Web sites, although DesktopLawyer, run by his father and uncle, did feature at number five. The only category in which Cohen failed to make any impression was sexiest female webmaster. Cohen's amazing achievement is published on Internet Awards. Although the site was registered by Internet Awards Company last month, efforts to track down those behind InternetAwards have so far proved fruitless. The awards' organisers have also failed to reply to an e-mail asking for further details about the awards. Yesterday, a modest Cohen played down his success saying that he only learnt about how he swept the board via an e-mail. Unfortunately, he couldn't say who had sent it to him. CyberBritain has now removed a link it had to Internetawards.co.uk. Drew Cullen writes: Described by today's Guardian as a "rudimentary search engine that is none the less growing faster than any online network", CyberBritain.com is certainly news to The Register. And we're supposed to know about such things. In a press release issued yesterday, CyberBritain explains that has grown quietly since its launch in July 1998 to "becoming (sic) one of the leading online services in Europe. It claims a "staggering 420 million page impressions" served -- but that's from July, 1998 to now. CyberBritain.com consists of "nine leading portals including CyberBritain.co.uk, (the UK's number one Search Agent), BritishMP3.co.uk (The UK's number one MP3 Search Engine) and SoAsian.com (The UK's number one Asian Community Portal)". Not mentioned on the press release are two other leading portals KosherSex.co.uk and SexySearch.co.uk, as well as old favourites JewishNet.co.uk, DesktopLawyer.net and (who the hell are they)Hermia.com and E-U.co.uk. In other words it is a portal of not very well-known portals. That no-one's heard of. Which is counting all the page impressions of the other nine sites as its own. Retroactively. Young Cohen is the founder of JewishNet, since Durlacher-ised and renamed SoJewish.com, in pre-IPO branding. This is an undoubted success, even if Cohen no longer has anything to do with day-to-day running of the business (he is on the payroll as creative and development director with - he tells us -special responsibility for ecommerce). But with CyberBritain.com, it appears his ego is doing most of the talking. He needs to walk, before he learns to run.®

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