I'm very happy to announce that Kickstarter is live! I first mentioned the project back in September, and have been privileged to sit on the board and advise their development for the last ten months.

Kickstarter aims to let creative people of all kinds -- journalists, artists, musicians, game developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers -- raise money for their projects by connecting directly with fans, who receive exclusive access and rewards in exchange for their patronage. Like Josh Freese and Jill Sobule, the site allows creators to have multiple tiers of rewards (e.g. $20 for the book, $50 for signed copy) with optional limits for each.

The model is simple: a project creator sets a fundraising goal, deadline, and an optional set of rewards for backers. If the goal's reached by the deadline, then everyone's charged via Amazon Payments and the backers get their goodies. If the goal's not reached, nobody's charged. It's all or nothing.

If you want to raise money to build an iPhone app, make a run of t-shirts, or print a book, you can do it with absolutely no risk or up-front costs. If there's enough demand for your idea, you'll be able to sell every copy before you've spent a dime.

Kickstarter also offers publishing tools, where creators can post project updates with audio and video, either publicly or for backers only. For projects without a physical reward, exclusive updates could be a great incentive for people to get involved. Check out this project for a good example.

Anyway, I'm thrilled to see what people come up with! For now, anyone can back projects, but you'll need a Kickstarter invite to be able to create your own project. (You can get an invite from an existing member, or sign up to get notified when Kickstarter opens to the public.)

The nominations for the 13th Annual Webby Awards are in, and browsing the list, I'm a little surprised at how much it's grown. I remember the novelty of the first ceremony at Bimbo's back in 1997, with its quirky five-word speeches and humble 15 categories.

I was curious to see the growth trend, so I tallied up the total number of categories on their official site. In the last five years, we've seen a 330% increase in new categories to a total of 129 today. In the chart below you can see the gradual rise during the dot-com era and brief reduction after the bust, only to swell along with the Web 2.0 movement. In 2005, with the introduction of the new Mobile, Advertising, and Film award types, the number of categories more than doubled to 63 and continued to expand every year since.

With so many categories, you'd think that their business model hinged on getting as many entries as possible... Which, of course, it does. Submitting an entry for Webby consideration costs $275 for the Website, Mobile, and Advertising categories, while the Film categories costs $195.

All of this reminds me of Cool Site of the Day, a former web mainstay that's long since drifted into irrelevance. Once they started taking cash for consideration, the award became less meaningful and the picks were less interesting because of it.

At what point does the Webbys meet the same fate as CSOTD, where the only people who care about the awards are the nominees themselves?

Getting linked from a high-profile website is almost always a huge compliment, well-received by any blogger. But Monday morning, I saw two friends taken by surprise when they were featured on the front page of AllThingsD, the Dow Jones-owned news site edited by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal. I talked to Kara, as well as several other writers and bloggers, to understand why.

Background

After Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter's article about URL shorteners was posted on AllThingsD, he asked on Twitter, "What the hell is this?" Danny Sullivan replied, "It's a compliment. AllThingsD liked your shortener article enough to feature you on their home page." Joshua responded, "It's just very unclear to me where that came from, who wrote it, why they are showing ads on it, etc."