[burgerbrain]

raising awareness > winning worthless awards.

You see, the award itself is not worthless, because the real value in it is making the general population aware of yourself.

"Any time spent debating whether Assange should have won it could just be spent actually helping the Wikileaks movement."

Arguments of this form are always silly. I don't dedicate all of my free-time to any one task, nor do I have any desire to do so. I lose nothing by taking 2 minutes out of my day (2 minutes that would have otherwise been spent picking my nose or staring at the wall) to complain about Assange not getting this award.

[mikerhoads]

Raising awareness is also a largely bullshit concept. It is the banner people who accomplish absolutely nothing waive around to feel like they've accomplished something. The only time it is valuable is when awareness is being raised about previously unknown information (which is what Wikileaks does).

Also, the argument is not silly. You absolutely lose something by taking 2 minutes of the 34,790,000 minutes or so you have. You lose 2 minutes. The better use of those 2 minutes in support of Wikileaks would be looking for a new leak or more realistically, circulating information that they've recently leaked.