The W3 Awards honors creative excellence on the web, and recognizes the creative and marketing professionals behind award-winning sites, marketing programs, and video work created for the web. Currently in its fourth year, the W3  Awards received nearly 3,000 entries from ad agencies, public relations forms, interactive agencies, in-house creative professionals, web designers, graphic designers, and web enthusiasts.

You can see a full listing of the winners over on the official awards site, as well as a gallery of the best-in-show and gold award winners over at the IAVA Winners Gallery. We at Taunt Media would like to issue a hearty congratulations to all of the other winners for 2009 — cheers!

nextMEDIA’s inaugural “Digital Hot List” competition recognizes emerging Canadian digital media properties and the talented individuals behind them, and helps build a bridge between those properties and potential advertising partners.

The Digital Hot List looks for digital products that are:

1. Emerging
2. Innovative
3. Defined
4. Niche
   … and provides awesome opportunities for product integration.

“After a nationwide hunt nextMEDIA and our advertising partners have managed to select five excellent finalists. The final decisions were based on key criteria as a uniqueness, targeted audience and a high potential for product integration,” comments Mark Greenspan, Achilles Media, VP of Digital Media. “As advertisers continue to play an increasingly important role in digital content production nextMEDIA will continue to offer opportunities to work with agencies.”

nextMEDIA Banff, organized by Achilles Media, is where the world’s leading edge content creators, aggregators, broadcasters, agencies, advertisers, and solution-providers meet to develop key business relationships.

March 10, 2009, VANCOUVER, BC — Protagonize (www.protagonize.com) has been named a finalist in the Community category of the 12th annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Web Awards.  The 2009 SXSW Web Awards aims to uncover the best new websites and celebrate the top innovators who are building and implementing tomorrow’s online trends. 

Writer and political commentator, Baratunde Thurston, will emcee the March 15 Web Awards ceremony presented by Adobe, which will name winners in 20 content categories, as well as “People’s Choice” and “Best of Show.”   The ceremony will take place on the 6th floor ballroom of the Downtown Austin Hilton Hotel at 7:00 p.m.

“We’re thrilled to be a finalist in such a prestigious competition,” said Nick Bouton, founder and principal of Taunt Media, the consultancy that developed and operates Protagonize. “It’s a huge honour to have our work recognized by such a renowned event. The competition will be pretty stiff, but we’re pretty humbled to be sharing the spotlight with Delicious 2.0, Fluther, Lost Zombies and Trusera. We’re hoping that the exposure we gain at SXSW will help the site grow and allow us to keep building new features for our creative writing community.

As a niche site, Protagonize has experienced steady growth since launching in late December 2007, with a thriving community of nearly 5,000 authors actively writing and participating daily, and over 20,000 visitors a month reading and subscribing to ongoing stories on the site. Protagonize recently won two separate categories of the 2008 Applied Arts Magazine Interactive Awards and continues to attract a diverse and vibrant collection of authors from around the world.

Winners of the SXSW Interactive Web Awards will be announced at a ceremony on March 15, 2009. For more information about the awards and to view the complete list of finalists, visit the following site: http://sxsw.com/interactive/web_awards/finalists.

About Protagonize

Protagonize.com was developed as an attempt to modernize the collaborative creative writing arena; the site provides enhanced usability to authors, creating better tools for them to publish and distribute their content in a serial format, and allows them to easily work with others if they so choose.

Protagonize is owned and operated by Taunt Media, a consultancy that develops and maintains several community-driven collaborative web site properties in a variety of fields. For more information, please visit http://www.tauntmedia.com.

About the SXSW Interactive Festival

Scheduled March 13-17 in Austin, Texas, the 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival provides practical how-to information as well as unparalleled career inspiration, bringing together some of emerging technology’s most creative thinkers.  The event features five days of keynote sessions, more than 200 panels, the SXSW Web Awards, the Interactive and Film Trade Show & Exhibition, the ScreenBurn Arcade, the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, and dozens of exciting evening events.  Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. For more information on SXSW Interactive, see www.sxsw.com/interactive.

The Applied Arts Magazine Awards are judged by highly regarded industry professionals and experts from across North America. In the variety of competitions hosted by the magazine, winning pieces are not ranked. There are no restrictions placed on the number of winners the judges may select. Entries are given a score by each judge independently and discussion between the judges is not permitted. The entries are judged based on creative merit, technical execution and suitability for intended end use.

There were a total of 54 winning entries in the 2008 Interactive Awards in over 20 different categories, with roughly 15% of the pieces entered making it through the judging process.

Winners receive exceptional year-round recognition on both the magazine’s Interactive Awards issue, to be published in March 2009 (which is read by more than 65,000 industry professionals.) Winners are also featured in the Interactive Awards Winners Gallery of the Applied Arts web site, which attracts more than 200,000 unique visitors annually.

It’s great to see Protagonize included in some rather elite Canadian company, ranging from the amazingly popular Club Penguin, to Freshbooks (which we’re proud users of), to the widely-read b5media, to our good friends over at ThoughtFarmer.

The Pick 20 awards were devised as a ranking of Canada’s Web 2.0 pioneers, as judged by a hand-picked group of . To quote their site, “Backbone and KPMG assembled a prestigious group of Canadian thought leaders, movers and shakers, practitioners and pundits to judge the PICK 20 nominations and comment on the winners.”

The goal of the awards is to recognize Canadian sites leading the pack in one or more of the following categories:

• Problem Solving: customer response, idea generation, solution brainstorming 
• Innovation: crowdsourcing, market prediction, participatory feedback 
• Collaboration: jams, customer input, user rankings 
• Knowledge sharing and management: teamware, wikis, blogs and collaborative content creation

The judges had this to say about Protagonize, which ranked 19th on their list:

19. Protagonize

www.protagonize.com

A collaborative fiction Web site in which “one author writes a story and others post branches or chapters to it in different directions. The result is an organic, evolving story where everyone can participate.”

“Beautiful thought. I love this and can see myself spending a lot of time on this site,” said O’Connor Clarke, although he and others expressed concerns about the site’s revenue model. “It’s an interesting niche, although I’m not too sure of the business model nor of the benefit of collaborative fiction writing vs. the single creative artist,” Moffitt said, and Trgovac added, “It’s well implemented as a concept, but how are you going to monetize it? Advertising, or no-advertising with subscription?”

While it would be have been great to have had a chance to sit down and discuss our plans for developing and monetizing the site with the judges before the article hit the newsstands, we’re still very happy they selected us for the award.

There’s an interactive panel / discussion event planned for September 16th down at the Wosk Centre at at Harbour Centre, as well as a meet and greet with PICK 20 winners and cocktail party. Protagonize will be attending — we hope to see you there! Here’s a little more information about the venue, or you can take a look at the event listing on Backbone Magazine’s site.

Backbone and KPMG: 1st Annual PICK 20 Web 2.0 Awards
Vancouver — Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
5:30PM – 8:30PM (includes cocktail reception 5:30PM – 6:30PM)
WOSK Centre
$50