Every year during the Vancouver International Digital Festival (VIDFEST) the POPVOX awards are handed out to the winners selected by the Voice of the People! The POPVOX awards celebrate and recognize all the fields of digital media in a variety of categories. The winners are annunced at the Gala event scheduled May 23rd (pretty soon) so buy your tickets.

Nominees submit their projects and the masses then vote for their favorites online (that's why they are the people's voice awards right).

The Vancouver International Digital Festival is an event for the top creative minds working in digital media. Attracting visionaries from games and digital entertainment, Web 2.0, interactive design, animation and mobile applications, it is an annual ‘must-attend’ in Vancouver, Canada.

More to come on this topic but to kick off the news, Raincity Studios President Kris Krug is part of the Juno Awards Host Committee for next year's show in Vancouver. If you are not in the know (or American), the Junos is the annual award program put on by Canadian Academy Of Recording Arts and Sciences - tube socks not required.

Anyhow, KK went to this year's awards show in Calgary to scout the event and came back brimming with ideas on how to engage Canadians and really accentuate the emerging artists throughout Canada (like CBC Radio 3 does). I suspect he'll bring big ideas about involving new media to expand the reach and enjoyment of the show through web communities, user generated content, and participatory culture.

Breaking news:

At Noon Pacific, April 21st, online publisher CNET announced the winners in the 2008 Webware awards and open source content management system Drupal wins the Webware 2008 award in the publishing and photography category.

While we don't get too hung up on awards, for Raincity Studios (and our colleagues formerly known as Bryght) and the Drupal community at large, this is a pleasant validation for the hard work and enthusiasm we dedicate to building this open source content management system.

And this is no light weight trophy! Here's what the organizers say about the process:

You'll hear more about this topic in the coming weeks but, ... to get you intrigued and activated, the Drupal-powered, Raincity Studios-hosted, community-driven, Vancouver-local, social-change-focused, web community Change Everything is a finalist for the Webby Award in two categories: the the People's Voice and Social Networking.

Vancouver is getting a bit more attention about the innovative tech activity frothing around the community - this time the kudos come from The Intelligent Community Forum.

This nonprofit think tank explores economic development and job creation in the "broadband economy." To accomplish their goals, the ICF publish reports, organize conferences and present award campaigns with a few categories, most notably the Intelligent Community award.