It's An Honor Just To Be Nominated...

While we're on the subject of awards shows, Monday night the Shorty Awards were also held here in NYC. What are the Shorty Awards? Why, they are the Oscars of Twitter, designed to "honor the best people and organizations producing short-form, real-time social media content." How do they decide who is "the best," you ask? Here's a brief synopsis from the Shorty Awards website:

The community is invited to nominate Twitter users for excellence over the past year. Each award recognizes each content creator's entire body of work, not just an individual tweet. Nominations are made by sending a tweet, whether it's through this site or on Twitter. 

In February, the nominees will be narrowed down to six finalists in each category.

Well my friends, this year I was one of the six finalists (out of thousands of nominees!) in the category of Real Time Photo of the Year. This category is described as follows:

The ubiquity of cameraphones combined with real-time distribution offered by Twitter has changed the world of photography. When something happens in one part of the world, people can now see it all over the world almost instantly -- if someone with a cameraphone and Twitter account is nearby. 

To be eligible, all photos must have been taken in 2010, shot on a cameraphone, uploaded to a social media (e.g. Twitpic, Instagram, Yfrog, Tweetphoto, Facebook or Flickr) and distributed via Twitter. 

The photo was judged on how newsworthy, interesting, and provocative it is, and how well it makes use of the real-time nature of the medium.

Wow! Little old me, a finalist for a Twitter Oscar! Apparently, I was nominated for this picture of a guy skiing up 10th Avenue taken (and posted to Twitter) the day after the December 26th snowstorm:

I never even knew the Shorty Awards existed until they tweeted to let me know I was nominated! Needless to say, I was surprised. And honored, of course.

As I mentioned, Monday night was the awards ceremony. I didn't make it to the ceremony, but they live-streamed the show online so I watched from home. Eric came home from work early, we ordered sushi, drank champagne and basically had our own little awards party. We had fun with it!

Drinking champagne and watching the Shorty Awards

The highlight of the ceremony was a performance by Amanda Palmer, in which she sang the most entertaining tweets of the year to the tune of Rebecca Black's "Friday" (link here if you've been living under a rock for the past two weeks). Very entertaining!

VIDEO: Amanda Palmer's performance

As for the actual award presentations, my category was one of the very last ones. I was up against a photo from the Haiti earthquake aftermath, a sleeping Toronto transit worker, flooding in Sydney, Kevin Smith on an airplane, and a photo of the moon taken by an astronaut from space. Needless to say, I did not win. The moon photo (by Astro_Wheels) won. How do you even compete with a photo TWEETED FROM SPACE? I mean, NYC is cool and all but it's no space. Still, it was fun to see our photo up on the screen at the awards show and hear them announce my name as a nominee. Yay!

Lousy screen grab of our photo during the award presentation (the one on the left)

VIDEO: Presentation of the award for Real Time Photo of the Year

In the spirit of Twitter, winners were asked to keep their acceptance speeches to 140 characters. That didn't always happen, but it was a good thought! Obviously I didn't get to give an acceptance speech, but I now give you my 140-character graceful loser speech:

Congrats @Astro_Wheels! It's an honor just to be nominated. Thx for nomination, & thx to my husband for taking a great photo! God Bless!

(That's actually only 136 characters. Considering how verbose I normally am, you wouldn't think I'd be good at Twitter, would you?)

Shorty Awards down. Next stop, Grammys.