The winners of the Horizon Interactive Awards were unveiled last week. In this eighth annual competition over 2000 sites were reviewed from 32 countries. The participants were judged on their creativity, user experience, and technical merit in media ranging from Web sites to DVDs. Several Drupal sites brought home awards, including those from Palantir.net, studio:module, and pingVision.

Drupal is a Webware 100 winner for the third year in a row. This year Drupal was in the Social & Publishing category with well known services including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Wordpress.com. Drupal was one of 10 winners in the category.

From CNET

The 2009 Webware 100 Awards recognize the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications on the Web today. After receiving more than 6,000 nominations for inclusion in the Webware 100, our editors selected 300 finalists. But the Web's users made the final cut, voting more than 600,000 times to select the 100 top products -- 10 each in 10 categories -- from our list of 300 finalists.

If you are a member of the Drupal community, you can add one of these badges to your Drupal site. A big thank-you goes out to all those supporters who voted for Drupal in the awards.

After winning control of the New York State Senate for the first time in almost 50 years, the Democratic party turned to Advomatic to quickly deploy a new website powered by Drupal. There were many challenges to be overcome, and their requirements pushed the envelope in some areas such as permissions and work flow. In the end, this site stands as a testament to what can be accomplished by a focused and experienced development team using the power and flexibility offered by Drupal and its community.

Packt Publishing has announced its first ever Author of the Year award. The award will be given to the author or authors of one book published by Packt in 2008.

Packt is aggressively promoting Drupal by publishing numerous books, and 2008 was clearly a watershed year for Drupal books. Here's a list of Drupal books and authors that are eligible for the award (in the order Packt's search engine returned them):

• Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Winborn
• Drupal for Education and E-Learning by Bill Fitzgerald
• Learning Drupal 6 Module Development by Matt Butcher
• Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreves
• Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions by Mark Noble
• Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 by David Mercer

Packt is asking the community to vote for their favorite authors. The top four authors' works will be submitted to a panel of judges who will select the winner.

Go vote and show Packt that their Drupal emphasis is appreciated.

Prentice Hall has just released Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, authored by Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer. This is a book to teach readers how to customize how Drupal looks, with a special focus on Drupal 6 and its new theme engine. Emma Jane and Konstantin cover everything you need to know to create great visual designs and interactivity with Drupal's behaviors, themes, and templates. They show how to style Drupal sites, make the most of its powerful templating system, build sophisticated community sites, streamline site management and build more portable and flexible themes. Also included are several case studies that walk thru the customization of everything from page templates to Web site forms.