2010 Shorty Award Winners Announced

The Second Annual Shorty Awards honor the most popular producers of short content on Twitter. Award winners are recognized in 26 official and 100s of user generated categories.

he winners of the 2010 Shorty Awards have been announced again, and this year's winners are peppered with significantly more recognizable personalities than in years past.
Over the last year, hundreds of celebrities and otherwise famous-types have joined Twitter, bringing no small amount of legitimacy to the microblogging platform, which some have said has struggled in the past to be taken seriously. Now that more and more real-life VIP's are showing up on the Shorty Awards list, will Twitter finally start to be considered as a network that goes beyond telling the world that you're making a sandwich?
Here's the final list of Shorty Award winners:

Advertising - Frank Adman, @FrankAdman

Application - TweetDeck, @TweetDeck

Art - deviantART, @deviantART

Brand (two-way tie) - Whole Foods Market, @WholeFoods; Sesame Street, @SesameStreet

Celebrity - Nathan Fillion, @NathanFillion

Cultural Institution (three-way tie) - Jonah Holland of the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, @lewisginter; Reduced Shakespeare Company, @reduced; Poetry Society of America, @Poetry_Society

Customer Service - Bonnie Smalley, @ComcastBonnie

Design - Smashing Magazine, @smashingmag

Entertainment - TrueBlood HBO, @TrueBloodHBO

Finance - Suze Orman, @SuzeOrmanShow

Food - Foodimentary, @Foodimentary

Government - Cory Booker, @CoryBooker

Health - Rachael Dunlop, @DrRachie

Humor (two-way tie) -  David Thorne, @27bslash6; Mrs. Stephen Fry, @MrsStephenFry

Innovation - Helen Klein Ross's Betty Draper, @BettyDraper

Journalist (two-way tie)- William Bonner, @realwbonner; Rachel Maddow, @maddow

Literature - Arjun Basu, @arjunbasu

Music (two-way tie) - Ivete Sangalo, @ivetesangalo; Ted Leo, @tedleo

News - The Diane Rehm Show, @drshow

Nonprofit - To Write Love On Her Arms, @TWLOHA

Politics - The Nation, @thenation

Science - Jen Scheer, @flyingjenny

Sports - Bill Simmons, @sportsguy33

Tech - Mark Watson, @soldierknowsbest

Travel - Paul Smith, @twitchhiker

Weird - The Llama, @DoWhatITellYou

Special Humanitarian Award - Carel Pedre, @carelpedre

Real-Time Photo - "Plane in the Hudson" by Janis Krums, http://twitter.com/jkrums/status/112191513

Although most categories featured just one big winner, there were runners up in every category, many of whom are equally interesting people to follow. If you're new to Twitter and don't quite know who you should be following, the Shorty Awards can be a great way for you to find the most interesting minds on a particular topic.
Although the "official" Shorty topics are restricted to those listed above, there are loads of "unofficial" categories that have their own winners and runners-up. You can find all of the details on the officialShorty Awards website, which also features a live video stream of the awards ceremony.
Whether you're new to Twitter or old-hat, the Shorty Awards have something to offer you. They're organized and decided upon by regular Twitter users like you, as opposed to some other notable entertainment awards (Oscar, I'm looking at you here). It's definitely worth your time to get onto the Shorty Awards website and start following some of the winners - and runners up.