Digg, your favorite social news site, ran a contest to celebrate and promote the release of the Digg API.

Entrants to the contest used both the Digg API and the Flash toolkit to create interesting works that could be viewed in flash and on the Adobe Apollo platform. Submissions ended on May 16th, and the work started for the judges who narrowed things down to the top 10.

Criteria for the final decision was based on:

• Effective display of data
• Usefulness
• Creativity

From this point Digg users got their say. Check out the winners on the site. This is just another great example of what we get when companies open their API's for developers to tool around in.

Earlier this year we had a little contest where we gave away 3 shiny copies of Vista Ultimate. Our three lucky winners have had some time to bathe in the cooling waters of Vista, and this past week we heard back from two of them: AJ and Shannon. How did they feel about Vista?

AJ wrote:
I must say, that eye candy just added another definition in the form of the snazzy aero effect and other visual goodies. But that's just where the sadness begins for me as I honestly couldn't find anything truly worth a "wow" factor in the functionality of the operating system compared to my MCE 2005. So much so that those totally in-your-face (or shall I say in Microsoft's face) TV commercials where one dude is the Vista and other Apple look like Simon Cowell-ish "brutally honest" 30 second reality shows. I got a kick out of the one where this Matrix-y bodyguard acts out Vista's new "Allow or Deny" function which truly starts treating your every move, pretty much, like you just poked a finger into a bubble boy's shell.

So for me, I give it lightning fast two thumbs down.

Shannon broke it down:
Pros
Eye candy-- in my opinion Windows Vista has a great look and feel, everything from the redesigned start button to the sidebar to the glass-like windows of the aero.

Integrated and instant search-- the redesigned start menu offers an instant search that allows you to find applications and files instantly I've found this to be an invaluable addition to windows.

More of Shannon's review after the jump...

We haven't been following the My Dream App contest as closely as our pals at TUAW, so in case you're not up to speed, here's the scoop: My Dream App is an "event where 24 finalists compete for a chance to have their dream app made into reality." At the contest's outset, people from all over the world submitted their ideas for the program of their dreams, and from those people a pool of 24 contestants was assembled by a panel of judges. Then those 24 were whittled away over five rounds by judges, many of whom could be called celebrities, like Steve Wozniak, Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, J. Allard, and Merlin Mann. Yesterday the final eliminations were made and the three finalists, whose ideas will be made into Mac apps, and who will get royalties on said apps, were revealed. The three winners and their dream apps were:

3rd Place: Michael Yuan - Cookbook. "The ultimate cookbook application, with online grocery shopping, thousands of recipes, Leopard voiceover technology integration, shopping list sharing, and more."

2nd Place: Farzad Sadjadi - Portal. "File syncing from the future. Sync folders and documents between Macs effortlessly and watch transfer progress through a cool, highly visual wormhole user interface."

1st Place: Cameron Westland - Atmosphere. "A virtual window to the outdoors for your desktop. View a virtual representation of your area's weather when too busy to go outside."

All of the the runners-up are also worth checking out (especially if you're looking for ideas for your next app), and all of the finalists and runners-up will be getting some pretty cool prizes.

VMware has announced the winners of its Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge, a contest which challenged teams to build preconfigured open source virtual machine images for VMware. I posted earlier this month about some of the very cool "Virtual Appliances" available at the VMware web site, and VMware's chosen winners are impressive indeed. The first prize winner is HowNetWorks, "a network analyzer that works at a higher level than more traditional network analyzers like tcpdump or ethereal." The team from Finland that created it will take home $100,000. The second place team, which will take home $50,000, built Trellis NAS Bridge, which "makes it easier to access files from one location (i.e., a client) even though the files may be stored on different computers, different file servers, and different operating systems," and the third place team's entry, which netted them $25,000, is Sieve Firewall, "a virtual machine that runs an extremely small Linux kernel to create a transparent bridging firewall." VMware also gave away prizes in Collegiate, Consumer, Developer, Server, and Community Choice categories.

Last night was the awards ceremony for the 10th annual Webby Awards. I can't believe it's been ten years already. Though a popular topic of discussion among bloggers is whether the Webbys are really relevant, I do enjoy the five-word speeches mandated by the ceremony. Winning lifetime achievement awards were internet pioneer Dr. Robert Kahn ("discover digital objects and handles") and Prince ("everything you think is true"), who gave a surprise performance. Breakout of the Year went to MySpace ("fun for the whole family"), and author Thomas Friedman ("the world really is flat") won Person of the Year. Also winning awards were Bebo ("in your face, my space"), JDate ("Jewish American Princesses... Smokin!"), Google Earth ("application formerly known as keyhole"), Google Maps ("make more magnificent mass something"), Flickr ("sorry about the tag clouds"), and PayPal ("PayPal thanks *a hundred and five* million users"). See the Webby web site for the complete list of winners as well as all the five-word speeches, or if video is your thing take a look at Amanda Congdon's highlights reel over at Rocketboom.

Last week Mozilla Corp. finally announced the winners of the Firefox Flicks contest, in which independent filmmakers submitted short ads promoting the open source darling web browser. The grand prize winner, selected by "accomplished entertainment and advertising judges including the talents behind Charlie’s Angels, American Pie, and Six Feet Under," is "Daredevil," by Pete Macomber (on the left in the photo above) which sports the memorable tagline "My other browser is a surfboard." Macomber's ad will be short-listed at the NY Festival of Advertising's 2006 International Advertising Awards later this month. Second place was taken by humorous fan favorite "Wheee!" by Jeff Gill (on the right). Take a look at the press release for the other finalists.

Mozilla's Extend Firefox contest, which challenged developers to make cool extensions for Firefox 1.5, has come to a close and the winners have been announced. Winning the grand prizes were Michael Wu's Reveal for Best New Extension, Chris Pederick's Web Developer for Best Upgraded Extension, and Josep del Rio's Firefox Showcase for Best Use of Firefox 1.5 Features. Each of those developers will get one of these cool Firefox-themed Alienware rigs and a bunch of Firefox swag. On top of that, eight Best In Class winners will be getting an iPod nano, a $250 O'Reilly gift certificate, and more swag.