Shorty Awards Honor Marketing Miniaturists

The Shorty Awards -- not a rap thing, but a celebration by three enthusiasts to honor "the best producers of short content" on Twitter, where messages have a 140-character limit -- were held in Brooklyn last night. The awards were hosted by CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, with special appearances by Shaquille O'Neal (on video) and MC Hammer. Winners were announced in 26 categories, including "Apps," "Weird," "Social Media" (sponsored by PepsiCo), "Green," etc.

The Advertising honoree was Peggy Olson, or rather, the Times reveals, "a bubbly marketing consultant from Portland, Ore., named Carrie Bugbee" who pretends to be the "Mad Men" character online and told the Times she does it for the usual reason authors commit themselves to fiction: "to see what kind of potential Twitter had to build brand without being obvious." The Politics winner was Republican operative Justin Hart (sample work: "Wet dreams about Obama at the NYT? Yikes. #tcot http://tinyurl.com/dl3cy2"). The Weird prize was taken by martinsargent ("Saw SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE tonight. Spoiler alert: You'd never recognize Regis Philbin, but he's WONDERFUL!").

The Wall Street Journal provided its own Live-Twittering coverage ("Big crowd around @McHammer, film crews loving him. "). We'd like to thank the Shortys for making Runnin' Scared feel like Leo Tolstoy.

Update: Jennifer 8. Lee trumps Twitter with a report on a book of six-word messages about love (Jonathan Ames: "It's like my heart has sciatica"), similar magazine entries ("I lured you with my mustache") and reader comments ("Your restraining order seems somewhat excessive"). Next year Runnin' Scared converts to one-word format, mostly "BUY!" and "HELP!"