We're happy to announce that Knight will offer travel grants for winners of the Shorty Awards (a contest to recognize users making an impact using the "microblogging" service Twitter) to attend the February 11, 2009 ceremony in New York. (You may request an invite.)

From the press release:

 

Since the launch of the Shorty Awards in December, tens of thousands of Twitter users have nominated their favorite Twitterers in 26 official categories (such as news, humor and politics) and in more than 1,500 user-generated categories. The five most-nominated users in each of the 26 awards categories are now Shorty Awards finalists. The final round of voting begins today and ends Jan. 23. The ceremony, at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood, will be the first gathering to bring top Twitter users together from all over the world.

 

Follow Knight Foundation on Twitter @knightfdn

Also, follow our new community site Knight Pulse @knightpulse and the Knight News Challenge @knc08

Knight is a funder of WNYC's morning radio multi-platform news program The Takeaway.

In between coverage about posted cheeky instructions for Roland Burris this morning:

 

The Democrats want to deny him, but The Takeaway's John Hockenberry takes to the telestrator to show Roland Burris how he can make it to the Senate floor and take a seat as Illinois' junior senator.

 

For more of The Takeaway, their site offers downloads of previous programs and frequent daily updates.

From our community site, Knight Pulse, a conversation with Brian Boyer about developing News Mixer, open source software that offers new comment options for news sites, with fellow graduate students at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism (a Knight News Challenge winner):

Details on the team's project site, Crunchberry.org and in Brian's blog posts on the agile, iterative process.

How do you think online comments can be improved?
Which of the three News Mixer comment options would you like to see implemented on a news site you read?