Rob Cottingham's blog | Social Signal

Funny thing – I was just thinking yesterday how unnecessarily complex it is to illustrate one of these posts with a screenshot, especially a cropped and annotated one.

As I write this, Irene Weiser from Stop Family Violence is on stage at NetSquared, telling t

One of our favourite collaborators, Courtney Miller of Floatleft, is the Drupal theming genius behind a cool (and cool-looking) new site that just launched.

We wish we'd been able to make it to DrupalCamp Toronto, but client business kept us planted firmly on this side of the continent.

Still, we were able to attend in spirit: by reading Khalid's (and others') terrific blog coverage of the event, and by oohing and aahing over his photo of the T-shirt. The DrupalCamp logo is brilliant.

(What's that, you say? You see the Social Signal logo on the back of the T-shirt? Why, yes – we are proud sponsors of DrupalCamp Toronto!)

Now, if there are any of those T-shirts left over, I suppose receiving a few of them might take the sting out of having had to miss the camp itself...

Things are changing at The Tyee, a Vancouver-based news and commentary site. Home to some of the best alternative coverage of issues and ideas in Canada, The Tyee's discussion threads were also becoming home to something a lot less welcome: vicious grudge matches among a handful of participants.

Readers were growing used to seeing interminable bouts of tit-for-tat insults, and would-be commenters were losing their appetite for taking jumping into the fray. It wasn't affecting every thread, but politicial discussions in particular had become dominated by a few angry belligerents.

I mentioned a few weeks ago how thrilled we were that Vancity's ChangeEverything.ca received an Official Honoree nod from the Webbys.

Now the final results are in. And we're delighted to salute friends and colleagues for their recent smashing success at the Webbys:

• Nothing but Nets, created by Communicopia for the UN Foundation, won the People's Voice award in the charitable organization category. NbN raises funds to buy mosquito bed nets for people in Africa – and protect them from malaria, a leading killer of children on the continent. (Just ten bucks buys a net; have you bought yours yet?)
• Truthdig, built by Hop Studios for Zuade, won both the juried and people's voice awards for best political blog. It's a web magazine offering news and commentary on underreported political issues and current affairs.
  
• Save the Internet's Independence Day video, directed by Matt Thompson, won the People's Voice award for best public service video. We first met Matt at Web of Change in 2005, and he's an absolute genius – it's nice to see that recognized.
  

The New York Times has called the Webby's the "Oscars of the Internet". That means two things:

• One, the awards dinner could be your only chance to ever see the above folks in a tuxedo or evening gown.
• And two, they've achieved something really, really special. Congratulations to them.