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The Shorty Awards honor the best people and organizations on Twitter. These unique awards are for the Twitter community, by the Twitter community. Online voting is public and democratic, culminating in an awards ceremony that recognizes the winners in 26 official categories as well as those in brand new crowd-sourced ones.

How the Shorty Awards Work

by Sara Jerome from the national journal

Thirteen years in the House and a stint as majority leader have furnished Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., with useful GOP and K Street support for his Senate bid. But Blunt's long resume also means a boost from another source: Google.

Not from the search giant's PAC, which has favored congressional Democrats this cycle and has not contributed to Blunt's campaign. Rather, Google and other search engines provide Blunt a leg up in its search listings.

When users search for neutral terms related to the race, such as "Missouri senate campaign," Blunt's fundraising page consistently ranks higher than that of his lesser-known Democratic opponent, Robin Carnahan, who finds herself on the second page of results. Sixty-eight percent of searchers review results only on the first page, according to an iProspect study. This may be particularly true for casual voters who go online just to figure out who is running.

The high search ranking for Blunt's campaign page has nothing to do with politically-motivated favoritism, but it may be another perk of Blunt's been-around status. The example shows how incumbency advantages (or in Blunt's case, holding a different office) can carry over into the increasingly important world of online strategy.

It also raises questions about Google's potential role as a kingmaker in elections as the company falls under scrutiny for its power to influence outcomes in the marketplace.

"As the search space has become concentrated in this particular search company, more Web sites depend on the decisions of a particular search engine operator," said Andrew Odlyzko, a search expert and professor at the University of Minnesota. "That includes in the political space."

Google acknowledges that its search methodology may provide certain competitors with advantages. "We understand how important rankings can be to Web sites... because a higher ranking typically drives higher volumes of traffic," wrote Google senior competition counsel Julia Holtz last week on the company's public policy blog.

Google ranks its search results using algorithms that aspire to call up the most useful pages. It boosts pages that seem more important and reliable, considering such variables as how much traffic a page receives and how frequently other sites have linked to it. "Google's intention is to show what's most relevant," said Galen Panger, a spokesman on Google's elections and advocacy team. "The point is to provide the most valuable results."

Online politicking is often associated with scrappy challengers, but candidates who have previously run for office may have an advantage in searches of some neutral words. Their pages have been floating around the Web longer, allowing them to accumulate more links and sometimes receive more traffic. "It's possible there are some incumbency advantages for some searches," Panger acknowledges.

Despite these incumbency advantages in neutral searches, there are some variables that may give challengers an edge in pulling users to their sites. "In many races, if you compare the number of searches for a challenger versus an incumbent, the challenger often has a higher search volume," Panger said. "Challengers also tend to be more active in reaching out to the online community, so that's another advantage they have."

Also, candidates are not helpless before Google's algorithmic might. Campaign web strategists make a concerted effort to ensure their campaign pages do not get lost in the sea of search results, and Google provides site owners with tips for becoming more search-friendly through its webmaster hub. Creating accurate page titles, using complete words in a site's URL, and providing a site map can help boost a site's rankings. "These are easy things a site owner can do," Panger said.

Does page ranking matter to a candidacy? Web strategists say yes. High page ranks are so sought-after that upping a site's ranking -- a practice called "search engine optimization" -- has spawned an entire industry of consultants who promise to boost their clients' Google results. When this practice is used to game Google's algorithms, it is sometimes viewed as a dark art that degrades the search engine's utility. Imagine, say, if Blunt blanketed his homepage with the words "Megan Fox," one of Google's most popular queries. He might get more hits, but Fox enthusiasts would be unhappy when Google ushered them to the site of the 60-year old congressman.

Google's overwhelming dominance of the search market has brought its power to determine marketplace outcomes under new scrutiny this year. Tech company Foundem and other so-called "search neutrality" advocates allege that the search engine is gaining an unfair advantage by favoring its own products in searches. The advocacy group Consumer Watchdog wrote the Justice Department last week urging it to investigate the issue, while the European Commission is already checking out complaints from Foundem and others.

These laments echo calls from major Internet service providers, including AT&T and Verizon, who want to see search engines regulated. They say prospective rules aimed at preventing phone and cable companies from toying with Internet traffic should extend to include new regulations on Google. AT&T lobbyist Jim Cicconi has argued that "if any entity on the Internet today has the ability to chill voices with which it disagrees, that entity is [Google]," according to PostTech.

The search giant answers that it is transparent about its rankings and that it has no interest in anything but searcher satisfaction. "We are confident that our business operates in the interests of users and partners," Google's Holtz wrote on the blog.

But Odlyzko predicts that concerns will only grow if Google maintains its dominance of the search market. If its political influence becomes an issue, the company could consider options that would give candidates equal advantages for grabbing user attention, such as listing trustworthy political data in a separate bar at the top of the results page (as it does for market data). Panger said the company "wants to be a positive participant in elections" and is not ruling out such options. He pointed to Google's tools for helping voters find their polling places at election time, along with YouTube's hubs for information about elected officials.

"We haven't done anything where you can search for 'Missouri election' and get all the various candidates, but I think it's a great idea," Panger said. The company has often been quick to adapt its services to user concerns, as it did in response to privacy questions about its social networking tool known as Buzz. Whether the company will adapt its services in response to complaints about competitiveness will be a major question going forward.

After all, Odlyzko said, it will not suffice for Google to tell searchers and Web site owners who do not like its ranking methodology that they can simply go elsewhere.

"Telling someone 'you can build your own search engine,' is not realistic," he said. "That's like telling someone who doesn't like their health care to 'build your own hospital' and 'hire your own doctors.'"

Inside Social Games:

The Christmas traffic decline has melted away, and a number of games saw significant growth in February — more so than January, anyway. However, for each significant gain, there were some loses as well, as roughly one-third of the list dropped in monthly active users, and a few of those drops are highly popular titles such as FishVille and Happy Aquarium.

On the lighter side of things, Zynga’s FarmVille continues to hold on to top honors with new records in monthly users once again, while competitor CrowdStar attempts to increase its popularity even further. Also, RockYou makes its move back to its former glory from the early days of Facebook with heavily increased MAUs for both Birthday Cards and Zoo World. Another game, Hero World, also made its debut this month.

February was a potentially big month for games, because Facebook introduced a home page redesign at the beginning of the month that moved applications from a bottom toolbar into the left-hand navigation column, and moved notifications from the toolbar to the top navigation bar. Facebook also added what it calls a Games Dashboard — basically, a home page filter that lets users see a page of the Facebook games they and their friends have been playing. So far, the impact does not look to be negative for social games overall. The full impact of the redesign will only be felt this month, though, as Facebook is removing application notifications from the new notifications bar.

Here are the highlights for the top 25 Facebook Games for February, 2010:

• Zynga’s FarmVille shatters its old records once again, gaining over 7.5 million new monthly active users, bringing the game’s total monthly players up to a whopping 83,004,461.
• At a distant second comes RockYou’s Birthday Cards with just over 47 million MAUs, having gained over 7 million new users as well — this gift-giving app isn’t really a game, although it contains a virtual currency. Rather, it has included a window for RockYou’s game Zoo World (more on that in a moment).
• Surprisingly, the virtual aquarium games did not do too well through February as Happy Aquarium from CrowdStar lost over 1.5 million users, with Texas Hold’Em Poker moving past it to #4. Zynga’s FishVille also dropped from #5 to #7 with roughly a 850,000 MAU loss. Furthermore, Fish World, from Tall Tree Games, has completely fallen off the charts.
• Though aquariums aren’t doing too well, zoo keeping seems to be growing as RockYou’s Zoo World gains an impressive 4.1 million monthly active users, showing that simple mechanics and cute animals — and however else the app is growing — can go quite far. It comes in at #8, up from #10.
• After a long game of cat and mouse, Playfish’s Pet Society finally loses out to PetVille by a difference of less than 300,000 users. They come in at #10 and #9 respectively.
• While CrowdStar’s long popular fish game dropped, the cold winter nights have proven lucrative for its tropical Happy Island app, as this warming title moves up from  #17 to #14 with almost a 2 million MAU gain. Unfortunately, Happy Pets still staggered slightly, losing 566,909 users, and dropping one ranking, to #17.
• In regards to tropical games, Island Paradise, from Meteor Gamesalso sees minor growth, moving up one rank to #19, with just over 7.6 million monthly active users, and just behind it comes RockYou’s Hero World. The super hero RPG earns 7,033,749 MAUs for the month of February.
• Little farming app (Lil) Farm Life reappears on the list, coming in with about 5.9 million MAUs and landing at #22.
• Lastly, the boom that was Shikha’s Pillow Fight seems to have died out, as the app has lost more than 8.4 million users, dropping from #14 to #25.

GDC 2010 returns to San Francisco March 9-13, 2010 for five days of lectures, panels, tutorials and roundtable discussions on a comprehensive selection of game development topics taught by leading industry experts. From year to year, the GDC continues to define market innovations and future vision, providing insight into the future of gaming.

What's the Game Developers Conference?

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is the world’s largest professionals-only game industry event. Presented every spring in San Francisco, it is the essential forum for learning, inspiration, and networking for the creators of computer, console, handheld, mobile, and online games.

The GDC attracts over 17,000 attendees, and is the primary forum where programmers,artists, producers, game designers, audio professionals, business decision-makers and others involved in the development of interactive games gather to exchange ideas and shape the future of the industry. The GDC is produced by the Think Services Game Group, a division of United Business Media.

This market defining conference features over 400 lectures, panels, tutorials and round-table discussions on a comprehensive selection of game development topics taught by leading industry experts. In addition, the GDC expo showcases all of the most relevant game development tools, platforms and services helping to drive the industry forward. The conference also features the twelfth annual Independent Games Festival, where new, unpublished games compete for the attention of the publishing community, and the tenth annual Game Developers Choice Awards, the premier accolades for peer-recognition in the digital games industry.

Most, if not all, YouTube videos now include a "CC" button that, if pressed, will automatically generate the closed-captioning technology. The technology processes the audio feed, using the speech-recognition technology used in the core voice search feature that has also built into the Android voice search feature, the GOOG-411 phone search, and other products.

Twenty hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute; Google could not provide a timetable on when all of the videos would be captioned, but it will be "very soon," executives said.

Google rolled out the closed-captioning technology in beta form back in November, along with a technology to help synchronize the captions to the actual video.

The technology still isn't perfect, but Google is also using YouTube, with its vast array of accents, languages, background noise, and other distractions to improve its technology.

But the closed-captioning also means that millions of users who are hard of hearing, deaf, or simply speak another language as their primary language can now have a greater access to YouTube videos, the company said. "A core part of YouTube's DNA is access to content," said Hunter Walk, the product team lead for YouTube. "From day one, that's what we were hoping to do with video."

At the present, YouTube can only "understand" spoken English to auto-generate the caption track. However, Google's translation services can also take the English machine-transcription track and translate it to up to fifty languages. Adding more languages that Google understands "is a priority," said Mike Cohen, a speech technologist at Google.

"This is huge," said Ken Harrenstien, a software engineer at Google and one of the project's leaders. "You can go to any video online and now you can see some captions. It's not perfect; we know it's not perfect. Sometimes it's funny. But I love it."

Users can also edit and assist in the transcription. Any text editor or any tool that's used to edit caption files can edit the machine transcription, Google executives said, and then re-upload it for others to use.

On older videos, a button may appear that allows users to request a machine transcription of the audio. When pressed, an automated request is generated to the process that generates the transcription. With enough requests, the video will be pushed upward in the queue. Google executives said that a typical request may take a few hours to a day or two to be transcribed. As the process improves, already-transcribed videos may be re-transcribed, Cohen said.

Google has also partnered with a number of content partners, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, Duke University, MIT, PBS, National Geographics, and Demand Media.

Internet Explorer 6 died on March 1, 2010, in Mountain View, Calif., after a family rival removed it from life support. The simultaneously beloved and detested Web browser was nearly 8.5 years old.

IE6, as it was known, was born on Aug. 27, 2001, to parent Microsoft Corp. and was presented to the world by its loving caretaker, Windows XP. It is survived by Microsoft, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8.

A funeral will be held Thursday at the Forest Room 5 bar in Denver. Services will be hosted by Aten Design Group, whose employees had a complex relationship with IE6.

"It's something people love to hate," Justin Toupin, Aten Design's principal and creative director, told seattlepi.com. "It's been around forever and it's getting old."

Internet Explorer 6 was the sixth in a popular bloodline of Web browsers from Microsoft. When it was released, it was on the top of the world. But in the years since, IE6's reputation has been marred by security exploits and complaints that designing Web sites for it is a pain.

It played a starring role in Microsoft's U.S. antitrust fight over the bundling of Internet Explorer and Windows. And, more recently, it contributed to the cyber attacks Google publicized by threatening to pull out of China.

CNN.com:

More than 100 people, many of them dressed in black, were expected to gather around a coffin Thursday night to say goodbye to an old friend.

The deceased? Internet Explorer 6.

The aging Web browser, survived by its descendants Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8, was to be eulogized at a tongue-in-cheek "funeral" hosted by Aten Design Group, a design firm in Denver, Colorado.

The memorial service was to feature a coffin holding a "body" that has an IE6 logo for a head. Attendees were expected to eulogize the Microsoft browser by sharing remembrances, some of which have already been posted on the company's online funeral invitation.

"I feel terrible admitting this, but ... I never really liked him," posted someone who gave his name as Eddie Escher. "He had so many hang-ups, and he looked awful -- especially in his later years. But... he was always there when you needed him. You have to give him that."

TechCrunch:

A few weeks ago, we noted that the Denver, CO-based design company Aten Design Group was holding a funeral for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), the much-hated browser. The funeral took place last night. It wasn’t without controversy as there were protestors, and even a bouquet of flowers sent by Microsoft. But overall, it looks like it was a classy ceremony.

The blog Nonprofits and Web 2.0 was on hand and has posted several videos (a few of which I’ll embed below). There’s also a huge set of pictures in this Flickr album. As we noted originally, despite the funeral, IE6 is likely to live on for a few years as many sites are likely to still support it for the foreseeable future (though YouTube turns off support next week). And don’t forget all those pour souls in corporate jobs who are forced to use the browser because their IT departments won’t allow them to upgrade.

Biomimicry isn't new, nor are robotic hummingbirds, but the latest 'bot to come out of Chiba University in Japan makes even the DARPA-inspired Nano Air Vehicle -- which is very cool, needless to say -- look like last year's robotics.

Weighing only 2.6 grams and controlled by an infrared sensor, the tiny four-winged 'bot bobs and weaves through the air like a hummingbird, going as high as ten feet for up to six minutes at a time. By comparison, the makers of DARPA's Nano Air Vehicle were still working toward a 10-gram design last we checked.

While Chiba's robot has a hummingbird's agility, it has not yet achieved the stationary hover that makes designs like this so exciting. However, researchers there plan to have it hovering very soon, and by 2011 they hope to have it hovering with a microcamera so it can relay images to its handlers.

The idea is to use the 'bot in disaster scenarios in which search and rescue personnel need eyes in tight places or to perform recon in areas that are too dangerous for humans to go stomping around. But the military and intelligence benefits of a tiny, hovering robot like this are absolutely huge, offering an unparalleled means of surreptitiously looking around the next corner or inserting audio and visual devices into places where a special forces or intelligence operator might look out of place.

That is, until the army of cyborg insects spies is ready to deploy.

Recently signed by Virgin Records and featured on the 2010 Olympic Soundtrack - The band will go live on stage at 10pm CST at Speakeasy/Terrace59 in Austin, TX on 3/13/2010 after we stream in We Hear Your Voice aid workers live from Haiti! 

Green River Ordinance is an American rock band from Fort Worth, Texas. Their name refers to Green River Ordinances, laws which prohibit door-to-door sales unless the house's owner gives permission to do so.

Songs:

On Your Own - Out Of My Hands - 2009 - 4:21

Endlessly - Out Of My Hands - 2009 - 3:35

Goodbye L.A. - Out Of My Hands - 2009 - 3:47

Come On - Out Of My Hands - 2009 - 3:50

About Green River Ordinance:

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed. – Carl Jung

Assuming Jung is right, the same logic would dictate that the meeting of five personalities would create an equal reaction, five-fold in its power to change. 

Such a meeting has taken place. Despite the remote Texas setting, five boys found each other. Accident, inevitability, chance, fate…no one will ever be able to explain whatever it is that draws the colors of the spectrum together into one stream of pure white light. 

Green River Ordinance was born from this light. Brothers Geoff and Jamey Ice, Josh Jenkins, Joshua Wilkerson and Denton Hunker transformed their lives into one singular dream. The dream of creating music. While most kids their age were worrying about high school, they were writing and performing their own music. 

Guitarist Joshua Wilkerson’s father played in bands, touring with The Beach Boys, Cheap Trick, The Guess Who and The Fabulous Thunderbirds. Brothers Jamey and Geoff Ice were raised by music-loving parents who even followed The Grateful Dead at one time. Mr. Ice also has his own country-western band, and encouraged his boys to play blues and classic rock at an early age. Singer/guitarist Josh Jenkins’ father was a country singer and songwriter. He had Josh decked out in old-fashioned western clothes and singing in local oprys as a small child. 

With all the music in their lives, all they needed was a common denominator that would bring them together. Songwriting, it seems, was that catalyst. 

Jamey and Geoff formed the original GRO, with a different lineup of musicians that came and went as time went on. At the tender ages of 16 and 14, they were seasoned club performers who already had a local following. When Josh joined the band they discovered the bond they had in writing songs. There was great freedom in shaping and hashing out the songs that they wrote. It was the most incredible experience. When Joshua and Denton joined the band the songwriting was taken to a whole new level. There was a certain magic that happened when all five of them got into a room together to write songs. 

They found that every one was able to contribute to the songwriting process; and that certain chemistry would took place as they all worked together. In between shows they would sit around and work on songs. Each person would bring their own ideas to the band; sometimes it would just be a riff, or a tune. Sometimes it was a whole piece. But together they found that they would create a free flow of ideas between the five of them, as they encouraged and pushed each other forward. At the end of the process after much work and challenging each other, the song would be complete. 

They recorded their first EP in the basement of their church, a CD that sold out its first pressing in just a few months. While still not old enough to be customers in the bars they played, they played to packed houses. An upheaval of popular local support led them to open for Bon Jovi in Dallas in 2006. 

The momentum grew. They were soon opening for or touring with bands like Collective Soul, Tonic, Third Eye Blind, Hanson, SisterHazel, Blue October, Bowling for Soup, Simple Plan, and Flickerstick, to name but a few. 

Accolades flowed toward them: The Best New Band of 2003 by the Fort Worth Weekly, then The Best Live Band the year after. In 2006, they were named Best Artist of the year, had the Rock Album of the Year, and the Song of the Year at the Fort Worth Music Awards. In 2008, they repeated the Artist of the Year award by the same folks. MTV Best on Campus named GRO one of the top twenty college bands in the U.S. Radio Shack selected their song “Piece It Together” to pre-load onto over 500,000 MP3 players they sold around the world. Blogcritics.com named them the top unsigned band in the world in 2006. 

That changed in 2007 when they inked the deal with EMI/Virgin Records, joining a stable of talent that reads like a Who’s Who of rock music. From the Immortals like Pink Floyd and Bob Seger to the newer classics like Beastie Boys and Coldplay, GRO has now taken their place on the very professional stage of the music industry. 

But the band is anything but green. They’ve lived the life, and on stage or in the studio, this fact is obvious. Smooth, polished and professional, their musicianship and stage presence belies their youth. They look like rock stars. But that’s where the similarity ends. You won’t find these young men bashing their way through hotel room walls. Even after all this time in the business, they are still as gracious, enthusiastic and real as the day they recorded that first CD in their church basement. They are as likely to be seen having a quiet lunch with their grandparents as they would be hanging at the Whisky in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Positive in the face of all the adversity rock and roll can throw at them, the joy they have with each other, and with their music, shines in their faces. They’re making their own rules, taking their own place in time, making their own mark on the world. 

Their new album, Out of My Hands, will be revealed in February of 2009. The band spent a year writing and perfecting the songs and then another eight months recording with producers Mark Endert (Natasha Bedingfield, Maroon 5, Gavin DeGraw), Jordan Critz and Paul Ebersold (Sister Hazel, 3 Doors Down, Third Day). The band has always had a strong vision about what they wanted to do musically, and are thrilled to see it finally come true.