It’s my pleasure to announce that Clearspring has won Blogger’s Choice for Embeddable Widgets in Mashable’s Open Web Awards. We were selected by Mashable’s panel of over 100+ blog partners from around the world.

We want to thank you guys, our community of users, for helping us to get here. Together, we’ve built the leading widget distribution platform.

Before you head off to grab the celebratory latte, we still need your help. Voting for Mashable’s Open Web Awards “People’s Choice” doesn’t close till this Sunday night at 11:59 pm PST. So… please continue to vote for both Clearspring and AddThis.

Here are the voting widgets:

Thanks! Oh… and feel free to drop me a line any time. I always love hearing from our users. – justin@clearspring.com or @thorpus on Twitter.

Friends, I have some great news. With your help, we’ve been nominated for three categories of Mashable’s Open Web Awards. Clearspring has been nominated for best in Embeddable Widgets. AddThis has been nominated for best in Blog Plugins and and Social Bookmarking.

All I can say is THANK YOU!. Your nominations & votes mean so much to us. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you. It’s all of your time, thoughts, and feedback, which have helped to make our tools best-in-class. We’re absolutely a team in this process.

Well, we need your help again. We’re on to Round 1 of voting for the Open Web Awards. Mashable has created these handy dandy widgets to help with the voting process. (See them below) We’ve taken their widgets and wrapped them with our widget platform Launchpad so that you can place them and share them all over the Web.

Until midnight on November 30th, you can vote once for Clearspring and AddThis every 24 hours in the categories we’re in.

Thanks again for all your help with this. Here are the widgets:

The 2nd Annual Mashable Open Web Awards (http://mashable.com/openwebawards/home/) is now accepting nominations and their selection process is based on nominations and voting generated from the Web at large. So, we’re asking our customers to take a brief moment to fill out the attached Mashable widget form and submit a nomination for Clearspring in the Embeddable Widgets category.

It’s quick and it’s easy. All you need to do is enter an active email address, hit the submit button and then verify your nomination when they send you a confirmation email. Here’s the voting widget, feel free to post it to and share it from your favorite social network. Make sure you click the black “get & share” button.

http://www.clearspring.com/widgets/4918b43816785512

As the Web’s leading widget network, Clearspring helps publishers like you extend your audience on the Web. We are dedicated to making it as easy as possible for end users to share your content. And, best of all, the Clearspring platform is free. So, if you have a moment, please vote to nominate Clearspring before 11:59 PM on November 16, 2008. Thanks!

Best Regards,

Justin Thorp
Clearspring Community Manager

…and I approve this message

PS: Do you use AddThis, the world’s most widely used social bookmarking button on the Web? If so, can you show them some love? Vote for them below:

Our friend iStrategyLabs CEO Peter Corbett has recently launched with the District of Columbia Apps for Democracy. It’s a challenge to developers and agencies from around the country to take the public data produced by the District of Columbia (DC) government and create interesting applications and visualizations that will help make lives easier.

This is a great opportunity to innovate and find new interesting uses for this otherwise not that exciting data. Plus, At the end of the contest, 60 prizes will be handed out ranging from $100 to $2000 for a total of $20,000. Oh and it’s not limited to people in the DC area.

So if you have sometime this weekend, bang out a quick app or widget. You could potentially make some cash and help make people’s lives easier.

I’d love to see someone make some Clearspring widgets for the contest. If you make something, send it my way and I’ll try and highlight it on the blog. My e-mail address is – justin@clearspring.com

We’ve seen a couple of great success stories. Back in December, the movie Cloverfield launched a trailer on a Clearspring widget. Just recently, the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull launched a Clearspring widget which includes all its latest trailers.

Well another movie can be added to these ranks. The upcoming Lionsgate’s film The Spirit has made a widget for the movie that includes the trailer, news, a gallery, the blog, downloads, links to the fan fan forum and movie Web site. Plus the studio is doing a contest where whomever can drive the most traffic to the widget will win a trip to San Diego Comic-Con.

Being a big nerd, as most of us are at Clearspring, this definitely has me excited. Both of Frank Miller’s earlier movies Sin City and 300 were beautiful and this one seems to live up to the same standard and with the contest, how could you ask for a better prize?

So… go and share the widget with all of your friends!!! What are you waiting for?!?

Oh yeah… here’s the widget.

ABC has picked nine of their television show widgets that use Clearspring Launchpad. The widgets contain video trailers for upcoming episodes of their shows.

Every 10 times a video is watched in the widget, a tree sapling will be planted. This is all tracked using our analytics & reporting functionality via the widget console.

Use the ABC widgets, watch the videos, and trees will be planted. It’s that easy.

The participating ABC widgets are:

• Dancing with Stars
• LOST
• Squeegees
• Brothers & Sisters
• Desperate Housewives
• Grey’s Anatomy
• Ugly Betty
• Samantha Who?
• Bachelor

At Clearspring (right outside Washington D.C.) there’s not a tremendous amount of woodland, yet many of us have lived in places where trees are far more abundant. When you experience this difference you really start to appreciate trees even more. Thus, we’re all really excited about this campaign.

While widget girl (aka our Jodi McDermott) is a BIG fan of Grey’s Anatomy (of course , I’m a big fan of the TV show LOST.

Here is the LOST widget:

So what are you waiting for? Watch the videos, share the widget, put it on your blog, personalized start page, and social networking profile, and let’s get some trees planted.

Here are the details:

• their API
• the deal with the contest
• a demo of their stuff, if you have no idea what they do

Have fun!

• $5000 to a widget that gets 250K views/week
• $100K for building a business around Google

Full details are here on Google

Want to make some money with your cool widget? Go for it!

This also raises those interesting questions that all those Facebook app developers are having to answer: how do you handle all the load when you actually manage to build the super-successful viral application/component and all of a sudden are dealing with a huge server need?
One thing you can be sure of is that we won’t slow you down — we’ve got the best back-end in the business, folks. Seriously, our team is crazy good (not me, mind you, but the folks that actually do the work), and our scalability is one of the things that lands us those big content provider deals.

Go forth and multiply!