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.

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.

The purpose of this initiative is to encourage the reuse of content with respect to the original rights of the copyright holder(s). PlayTheWeb‘s eventual goal is to create, document, and support a new attribution microformat to track attribution and historical information about media items that are reused around the web.

PlayTheWeb.org is a blog created to detail the development of and related discussion around this new microformat. Over the weekend, Taunt Media launched the new look and feel for the site, which has been in the works for the last few weeks. The site is intended to encourage discussion of ethical content reuse, discuss related technologies and techniques, business models and applications, as well as foster the community who will help develop the microformat.

To reference the site’s raison d’être:

One of the core initiatives for PlayTheWeb.org is to support the development of a new open content attribution format in order to help content creators and application developers publish where and from whom reused content is being sourced.

As of today, the participating members of the PlayTheWeb initiative are:

David Gratton, Donat Group / Project Opus
Brian Leroux, Nitobi
Nick Bouton, Taunt Media / Protagonize
Rob Linton, Project Opus
Séamus O’Connor, Project Opus
Loren Davidson, Project Opus
Greg Field, Project Opus

Are you interested in the realm of content attribution? We’d love to hear your feedback. If you’re interested in joining the discussion, please follow us over at PlayTheWeb.org.