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Upside to Shorty Awards: short speeches

Twitter has its own Oscars honoring those who can Tweet... and get votes

Technology trends and news by Bambi Francisco Roizen
February 12, 2009 | Comments (2)
Short URL: http://vator.tv/n/6c3

(Updated to reflect that Pawluxury came in No. 1 in Business)

As a journalist for more than a dozen years, I've always appreciated a good headline. In fact, it's an art form. Few people have the talent to take content and create "context" with a clever headline. But when it's done correctly, it can draw readers in by the millions. Fark, the news aggregation site for funny content, has been promoting this art form for the last decade. Hence, it's booming traffic. In fact, the site's been on Jeopardy as a category twice in the past several years.

Now, Twitter has also taken short-form speak to a broad audience. While Twitter hasn't been a category on Jeopardy, it does have its own Awards ceremony. It's called: The Shorty Awards.

It's designed to honor those whose Tweets can impact or influence topics and issues that fall into such categories like business, advertising, apps, education, finance, food and humor.

Last night, 26 winners were celebrated for their Tweets, but mostly for their ability to get the most votes. Impressively, more than 50,000 votes were cast! The winners were offered $1,000 grants to travel to New York to attend the ceremony. The event also drew MC Hammer, famous musician, co-founder of DanceJam and prolific Twitterer with more than 55,000 followers.

Now, anyone who's watched Awards ceremonies know that often the acceptance speeches can get drawn out, particularly if a winner uses the opportunity to wax poetic about some political cause. 

The Shorty Awards, however, limits acceptance speeches to 140-character speeches!

To this end, the Shorty Awards makes the acceptance speeches something worth listening to. While I didn't attend the event, I can imagine that the the speeches were more important than those who received them.  

The Shorty Awards was brought to you by Sawhorse Media production. 

Here are some of the winners. Look, Guy Kawasaki, Internet pundit, and Twitter-holic, was nominated in the business category. But as he said, "I came in second next to a dog." Pawluxury came in No. 1, beating out Kawasaki. 

And, here's the Twitter thread on the event.


 

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Description: What is Twitter? Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called twee...
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Description: Fark is a satirical news forwarding site.  The Fark community identifiesodd, funny and entertaining news stories from across the Web...
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Comments

Comment_gbg
Adam Leidhecker, on February 12, 2009

Thanks for the article. Just wanted to write in. @GuyKawaski was nominated but he didn't win the shorty award for business. When the votes were all counted we (@PawLuxury) won the Shorty Award for Business. Notice the Award icon on our twitter photo.

We are honored and humbled we won. We are on twitter to connect open, honestly & transparently to help and grow relationships.
Being nominated by our followers is prize enough to know we are making a difference.
We mainly tweet pet lovers, but also bloggers, tech ppl, business ppl, and all ppl. We’ve met the best ppl on twitter and value our relationships.
Twitter is about community, and it’s fun.
-Adam, Wendy & Lola (woof woof)
twitter.com/pawluxury
[email protected]


Comment_gbg
Bambi Francisco Roizen, on February 12, 2009

Hi, Adam:
Thanks for letting me know. I'll be sure to clarify and update. I checked out your site! It looks great. In the meantime, I noticed you don't have a Pawluxury profile on Vator. You might want to create one as another way to share your Pawluxury story to our audience of professionals - entrepreneurs, innovators...


Comment_gbg
Adam Leidhecker, on February 12, 2009

Thanks. We're actually a business not a dog.(we'll eco-dog business) http://www.pawlux.com/about.shtml But that it's Lola's smile on the photo. :-) Humbled we won and our followers find our tweets helpful. We won by a big margin of 149 votes. Thanks for the correction.
We're you there at the event? If not you can watch the awards recorded live at www.shortyawards.com
@MChammer gave us our awards about at about an hour in.


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