Okay so this is massively outdated. The Webby Awards, which recognize online excellence, were held in early June. Here’s a listing of this year’s winners.

What’s great about the Webbys is that everyone is limited to five words in their acceptance speeches. No exceptions. Here are some of my favorites from this year’s event:

“Wait, we didn’t charge anything?” – Trent Reznor, Webby Artist of the Year

“Thank God Conan got promoted.” – Jimmy Fallon, Webby Person of the Year

“Can everyone get closer together.” – Flickr, community award

“Shinehart Wig Company thanks you.” – NBC.com Full Episode Player, broadband award

“Dude we got an A.” – Edutopia, education award

“I didn’t kill newspapers, ok?” – The Huffington Post, politics & blog award

“Robot sharks with lasers in space.” – Wired.com, science award

“Airna, will you marry me?” – Volkswagen Innovations, banner ad campaign award

“Read a freakin newspaper please.” – Detroit Free Press, sports video award

This map displays museums, parks, historical areas and other things for people to do in NW Georgia.

Some of the winners were announced recently in the Georgia Press Association Better Newspaper Contest, and yours truly was involved in a couple winning entries. The Rome News-Tribune, where I am Web editor, competes in division B, for papers with daily circulation of 15,000 – 40,000.

I won an individual award, placing third for best online news project. They haven’t announced yet which project won, but I’m thinking it’s either a page of local candidate information from the November general election, an interactive map of attractions and recreation in Northwest Georgia, or a special site I made to house all our coverage of the 2008 Coosa Valley Fair.

Obviously, I’m really proud of this individual award, but I’m prouder of the first place award for a project I was in charge of. Our paper’s staff came in first in the Best Photo Gallery on a Newspaper Web site category.

The gallery was a collection of pictures from the first day of school here – every single school was represented. I was in charge of planning and implementing the gallery.

I had myself, two interns and three photographers available to hit every school. Before the day, I divided the county up into zones, and planned routes for everyone to get the schools in their zones. Most of us had 4-5 schools to photograph.

As the photos were turned in, I worked on the gallery. To present the photos, I chose the Simpleviewer flash gallery program. It’s free, and allowed me to use XML to post captions with each picture. One of my colleagues, education reporter Elizabeth Cady, even contributed her handwriting to be the header of the page.

This thing took HOURS to complete, and I’m so proud it was not only recognized, it was recognized as the top gallery that was entered.

Convert videos to FLV
SoThink Flash Video Encoder
One of the few things the client had to purchase to make the site work, encoding software not only makes the video viewable online, it also drastically reduces file size. SoThink’s video encoder is $45 and is designed for Windows. But if you have a Mac, try iSkysoft Video Converter.

Upload the videos to the server
FileZilla
Each video file was at least 50 MB, so transferring files with FTP was the logical choice. There are any number of free FTP clients available. Though I use FireFTP on my own computer, it’s a FireFox extension and the client uses IE. So I recommended FileZilla, which is a great free FTP program.

Display the videos on WordPress
Wordtube plugin
I tried several different plugins for displaying the FLV files. I finally settled on this because it has an easy user interface that makes it simple to add videos to the backend, and places an “insert Flash video” button in the post creation window. It works in conjunction with the JW FLV player from Longtail Video, which is free for noncommercial sites.

Keeping it private
WordPress Password plugin
This plugin protects your entire WordPress site with a universal password. Just give it to anyone who you want to access the site. You still have to enter your own password to get into the admin pages. It’s also easy to change the password if you ever need to.

The two of them recently went on Jimmy Fallon’s new late night talk show and pretty much took over the whole thing. They were funny, self-deprecating and interesting.

For a couple guys who usually film sitting on a couch at home, with two cameras, they didn’t seem nervous at all to be on national TV. Of course, they have some practice with an audience; their live Diggnation shows are extremely popular and well attended.

Check out this video to see Kevin and Alex on the show, which also gives you an idea of what Diggnation is like. Then head on over to Revision 3 and download some episodes. They’re free, so you’ve got nothing to lose.

Here’s an example:

The free photo gallery maker can be used as an online tool, or installed as a plugin on Wordpress. The Web site also promises versions for Drupal, Joomla, Movable Type, Blogger and others are coming soon. Because this blog uses WordPress, I installed the plugin.

PictureSurf is really easy to use. Just upload your photos, give them captions if you like and make some choices about size, colors, etc. The app takes care of all the geeky bits. If you’re using the Wordpress plugin, you do all this in your post admin. If using the Web site, the app gives you a code you can copy and paste into whatever page you’re working on.

One note: To upload more than one photo at a time, you’ll need Flash Player 10. Otherwise, you’ll have to use a browser-based uploader that allows only one photo at a time. And if you try to use the Flash uploader with an older version of Flash player, it doesn’t work.

I don’t have Photoshop on my computer at work, but I’m constantly needing to edit photos. Our IT guy installed a copy of Gimp, but I don’t really like it at all, and it’s never worked properly on my machine, so I’ve been looking for another option.

Luckily, I’ve found one I like a lot.

Picnik is a Flash-based online photo editor that has both free and paid plans. I’ve been using it for about a week and have been so impressed that even though I have Photoshop at home, I’m thinking about spending the $25 for a year’s worth of premium access.

Why? The program is simple, seems stable and has a lot of features. I think I’ll be using it a lot when I’m away from my home computer, and $25 seems like a small amount for the convenience of the extra features, which include connecting to multiple social sites like Flickr and Facebook, full screen editing, no ads and unlimited upload storage.

But the free access is more than enough for most folks. You can upload a photo, then do basic edits like resizing, cropping, rotating, red eye, etc. Plus, there are several filters you can apply and shape “stamps” if you feel like goofing off. You don’t even have to register to use Picnik.

Also, there are several handy tools, like a bookmark applet, Firefox and Internet Explorer extensions and a Yahoo widget. The Firefox extension even lets you take a snapshot of your browser window and edit it in Picnik.

Really, if all you need to do with photos is some cropping and removing red-eye, you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on Photoshop or even $100 on Photoshop Elements. Just use Picnik.

• 14. Design a webpage in HTML by hand that features a picture of your cat
• 15. Use Photoshop to imperceptibly doctor a photo 27. Watch TV shows on the internet for free
• 18. Fix your parents’ computer over the phone without looking at a computer (I can usually do this)
• 50. Talk about things that aren’t tech related

Want to see the whole list? Click here