Inspired by the success of other Vancouver-based user groups focused on technical development and web-based experiences such as VanJS, netBC, and the Vancouver User Experience Group, the Vancouver Community Experience Group represents Vancouver-based online community developers, managers, and designers. Do you own, operate or participate in the management of an online community or social network? Join VanCX and share your experiences with the rest of us!

The group’s first meetup is currently been planned, but is no date or venue has scheduled as of yet. If you have a venue or location that might be suitable for our first meetup, please contact Nick Bouton at Taunt Media and we’ll do our best to get something organized with your help.

We’re looking forward to helping other online communities get started here in Vancouver — please join us if you’re interested in community development!

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 first phase of reroller’s launch was rolled out on December 1st, 2007, and comprised of a new blog covering massively multiplayer role-playing games (MMORPGs), with Mythic Entertainment’s  Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning taking the forefront of coverage in the early going.

The newly re-designed reroller blog is the first phase of several; the end product will be comprised of a variety of features aside from the blog and will be home to players of several highly popular MMORPGs. If you’d like to find out more about reroller, you can visit the site here and sign up up for the beta test, in case you’re interested.