The Shorty Awards, which honor 2008’s “best producers of short content” on Twitter, now have a benefactor — the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which will grant each of 26 winners a $1,000 prize to travel to New York and attend the February 11th awards ceremony. 
The Knight Foundation (@knighfdn) is known for having instituted the annual Silver Knight Awards (which both Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos and I share the honor of having snagged), as well as for supporting journalistic and community ventures — most recently through a grant of $1 million for a Martin Luther King Jr. national memorial. The Foundation sees this partnership with the Shorties as an opportunity to support “experimentation in news,” as noted by Gary Kebbel, the Knight’s journalism program director.
And the finalists are…
The finalists, which you can check out and vote for here, were chosen from more than 30,000 public nominations on Twitter. Five of the most-nominated users in each of the 26 awards categories now have a chance of winning a Shorty. Among the notable finalists are @hahlo (apps), @girlinyourshirt (advertising), @guykawasaki (business), @mintdotcom (finance), @ColonelTribune (news) — and not one, but two Betty Drapers in the entertainment category (@bettydraper and @betty_draper) — guess it was a smart move for AMC to un-ban those Mad Men accounts, huh? Oh, and Revision3 cewebrity (web celebrity) @martinsargent will be happy to learn he’s in the running for “weird.”
This final voting round starts today and ends January 23rd. The ceremony will be held at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood.
You can find me on Twitter here, along with fellow VentureBeatniks MG Siegler, Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison, Tam Vo, Camille Ricketts and Dan Kaplan. We have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.
Reprinted with permission from VentureBeat. Story copyright 2009 VentureBeat Inc. All rights reserved.
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