First Annual Awards
The awards were created in 2008 by tech entrepreneurs Greg Galant, Adam Varga, and Lee Semel of Sawhorse Media. They invited Twitter account holders to nominate the best twitterers in general categories such as humor, news, food, and design. Winners were chosen by more than 30,000 twitterers during the voting period. The founders of Twitter first heard about the awards after the contest had gotten underway, and expressed support for it.
The first Shorty Awards ceremony was held on February 11, 2009, at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, New York. Approximately 300 people attended the event. The event was hosted by CNN anchor Rick Sanchez and featured in-person guest appearances by prominent Twitter users MC Hammer and Gary Vaynerchuk and a video appearance by Shaquille O'Neal. The awards, which were voted on by Twitter users, were distributed in 26 categories. At the ceremony, the true identity of advertising category winner @PeggyOlson was revealed to be Carri Bugbee, owner of the public relations company Big Deal PR in Portland, Oregon.
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Famous quotes containing the word annual:
“I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)