The victors in the Shorty Awards in New York on Wednesday night – the first celebrating the best users of the short-form Twitter service – were positively rambling in their acceptance speeches compared to Webby Award winners.
The Webbies, also held in New York, for the best websites and services, restrict winners to five-word acceptance speeches – last year Stephen Colbert’s was “Me, me, me, me me!!!”.
Shorty winners had to speak in 140 characters or less, which resulted in almost unintelligible Tweet-like utterances:
“One small tweet 4 me. One giant tweet for @chuckdevore and conservatives everywhere. http://chuck76.com #TCOT,” said Justin Hart, Politics category winner. A full list of winners in categories from Advertising to Weird is here.
Ironically, as the New York Times reported, the acceptance speeches were almost drowned out by chattering among the twitterati audience, while many were focused on tweeting the proceedings as much as enjoying them.
There seems little doubt that microblogging is growing phenomenally. The Pew Internet Project reported on Thursday that 11 per cent of Americans aged 18 or older said they used Twitter or a similar service to share brief updates, in a survey carried out in December.
That was up from 9 per cent in November and 6 per cent in May.
Among age ranges, 25 to 34 year olds microblogged the most at 20 per cent, and over 65s the least at 2 per cent.
More than three-quarters of users of Twitter and other services use the internet wirelessly on a laptop or handheld device and, as ftchris, RichardWaters, dgelles and fttechblog, we are among the 27 per cent of bloggers using Twitter and its ilk, compared with just 10 per cent of those without one.
