The nominations for the 13th Annual Webby Awards were recently announced, and they include a number of sites built in Drupal! Presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the Webby Award is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. It’s like the Oscars for websites.

In addition to the juried awards, which are decided by a 650-person judging academy whose members include Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, R/GA’s Chief Bob Greenberg, “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, Arianna Huffington, and Harvey Weinstein, all nominees are also eligible to win a Webby People’s Voice Award, which is voted online by the global Web community.

This is where you come in! From now until April 30th, you can cast your vote at http://pv.webbyawards.com – this is a great opportunity for the community to come out, show their support, and get out the word that some of the best sites in the world are powered by Drupal. We’ve created a list of all the known Drupal sites sorted by the category in which they were nominated below; please let us know in the comments if we’ve missed any.

Winners will be announced on May 5th, 2009 and honored at a star-studded ceremony in New York City on June 8th hosted by Seth Meyers.

Do you want to know what's been done and what's coming in Drupal 7, how to make your site hacker proof, or see why walkah hates Drupal? Just visit dc2009.drupalcon.org.

The videos of more than 100 presentations that were given at DrupalCon DC are now freely available from the conference website, alongside information about the speaker and about the session topic. A ton of great information was shared at DrupalCon DC, and we wanted to continue to get it out to anyone who's interested. To this end, we turned the DrupalCon DC website into a conference archive with video of each session embedded in it so that anyone who missed a session, missed the entire conference, or just learned what Drupal is last week can still benefit from the knowledge shared in Washington, DC.

Go to dc2009.drupalcon.org to watch session videos, and thanks again to the crew that recorded all of the sessions!

We're stacking up karma points during this recession: over the weekend more than sixty people gathered at the DERI Institute in Galway, Ireland to talk, learn, and exchange ideas about Drupal. Various experts in web design attended coming from all over Ireland and as far as Scotland, England and the US. The best turn out was in absolute newbies - over half of the group who had traveled from all over Ireland.

As an incentive to push the learning curves we worked together to provide 3 Irish charities: Zikomo, Rural Science Association and Shadowbox Theatre with brand spanking new websites!

The plan was conceived 5 months ago when Alan Burke (alanburke) and Stéphane Corlosquet (scor) were brainstorming what to do for the next Irish Drupal event to bring it home to Galway. They wanted to do something different and make it over 2 days to take advantage of the presentation style of a BarCamp and to include a site-building challenge. Realizing they would need a great deal of help they recruited Stella Power (stella), Heather James (heather) for their expertise from organizing the previous DrupalCamp in Dublin.

We, the organizers, were impressed by the number of people who turned up as we expected 40-50. The rooms filled up fast and we had barely enough food for everybody. Alan had the insight to have a giant kettle available to provide plenty of tea and coffee with "loads of biccies" to all the attendees.

Digital Dollhouse is a virtual world where girls of all ages are empowered to become their own interior designers. Members can paint, furnish and decorate their own virtual dream houses complete with plants, pets and dolls, and even purchase and regift items in a virtual economy.

Designed and built in Drupal from the ground up, Digital Dollhouse uses Drupal as a front- and back-end engine and Flash for the primary front-end game play. Drupal was selected as a development platform because of its robust and extensible framework and excellent integration with Flash/Flex applications. The high quality and availability of third-party modules greatly helped in the decision, as well. We found that Drupal is an excellent choice for managing virtual worlds with virtual goods and currencies.

The heart of Digital Dollhouse’s business model is virtual goods micro-transactions. A member can visit the online store (which Digital Dollhouse calls the “Boutique”), purchase an item and then play with it in a virtual dollhouse (which we named the “playarea”). Userpoints proved to be a robust and outstanding solution for all of our virtual currency needs. Digital Dollhouse is also greatly indebted to the developers of the Invite, Buddylist, Voting API, Ubercart and Ubercart Userpoints modules.

In 2008, Jesyca Durchin and and David Schnepp of Digital Playspace chose Exaltation of Larks, a development and design firm in Boston and Los Angeles, to lead the development of Digital Dollhouse. From the beginning, there were many indications that Digital Dollhouse would be a success.

Bonnier Publications A/S publish magazines in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Holland. All the magazines have websites, some of which are quite significant and have a large amount of traffic and reasonable revenue, while others are simple presentation sites. Altogether Bonnier Publications (BP) has more than 40 sites in five different languages.

For many years, BP has used the Java-based CMS Polopoly for all their sites, but this has not been optimal and especially programming the sites was far too slow, even for the smallest adjustments.

During the summer of 2008, BP decided that their CMS technology needed replacing to enable their editorial staff and sales departments to take full advantage of the Internet's dynamic potential. They chose Drupal CMS, and Peytz & Co. was appointed strategic partner and asked to handle the platform migration.

In October of 2008, Packt Publishing launched a pilot program called RAW (Read As we Write). In the RAW program, draft versions of each chapter are released as the author writes them. The initial book chosen for the pilot was Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery.

At the end of March, Packt sent the finished book to the printers. The final version, improved by copious feedback from the Drupal community, is now available in both e-book and soft cover.

Packt typically offers a discount of 10% to all Drupal.org users (as I understand it, that offer is also good for Learning Drupal 6 Module Development). But the community's involvement has been great on this project. To say thanks, Packt is allowing me to share my discount code here. To get 15% off of the purchase price of this book, order the book from PacktPub.com and enter the following code in the promotional code box during checkout: DrupalJSjQ15.

Packt also contributes a portion of every book sale back to Drupal. So purchasing any Packt book on Drupal provides financial support for the project.