Mashable have opened this year’s Open Web Awards by asking for nominations for each of 50 categories. The Open Web Awards are Mashable’s online voting competition for the best innovations in web technology and social media. This year the categories are split between people, brands, facebook, twitter, mobile, photos, videos and media. You nominate by visiting the Open Web Awards official site.
I will be watching with interest as there are some excellent categories; best use of twitter, youtube, facebook, facebook fan page, facebook application, flickr photographer, web video series. And a new addition for this year are people, including best blogger, most inspiring and most educational to follow. I know who I think should win, but it’s the final results that count.
Last years awards were split across two different audiences. The people’s choice winners and the bloggers choice winners. The bloggers were the 100 bloggers that partnered with Mashable for the awards. So, really, they were the professional’s choice. But it’s the the general public, you and me, that make a person, brand, site, photo or video popular. It’s our combined choices that make websites successful. So, I’m interested in the people’s choice.
Many winners were sites we all know and use. Twitter won the best social network. Digg won the best social news. Delicious won the best social bookmarking. Flickr won the best photo sharing and youtube won the best video sharing. All very predictable. But I suppose things often are with hindsight. But there were some ‘not so obvious’ winners.
Sharethis won the the blog plugins category. It’s an elegant, simple and very popular button I see on many blogs. Ping.fm was voted as the top social networking application. Ping.fm is a free service to make updating your social network simple. You post from anywhere to anywhere. For webmasters it expands your network giving you greater reach and saves you time to boot. It would have got my vote (er…if I had voted that is). Doodle won the events category. Doodle schedules an event or a poll and allows you to share it with people and applications in your network.
I wonder what innovations we are going to see this year.
