I’m happy to announce that nominations are now open for the Open Web Awards!

Here’s a quick rundown of how it will work:

There are 13 categories:

1. Mainstream and Large Scale Networks
2. Applications and Widgets
3. Social News and Social Bookmarking
4. Social Search
5. Sports and Fitness
6. Photo Sharing
7. Video Sharing
8. Start Pages
9. Places and Events
10. Music
11. Social Shopping
12. Mobile
13. Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks

On each of the participating blog partner sites, anyone is eligible to nominate a site for each category. These nomination will run until next Tuesday, December 4th when all of the sites’ nominations will be counted up and the most-nominated sites will move on to the voting round which will begin December 6th. This voting round will last until December 17th at which point the selections will be cut down to 3 per category and a final round of voting will take place to determine the winner. This final round will end on December 20th when the winners will be announced.

The final round will also consist of a “Judges Choice” winner – the partner sites selected for this event will select the site out of the final 3 they deem to be the best in each category. This will all commence in a live event ceremony in January.

For the nominating round I plan on creating separate posts (a couple a day) for each of the 13 categories. You can nominate your choices in the comment area of these sections. It would be very helpful – though not required – if you also sent me a link for the site your are nominating.

If you would like to leave a comment on this post with a nomination you can do that as well, but if you want it to count here you will have to specify which category you are nominating the site you mark down for. For example Mainstream and Large Scale Networks – Facebook.

If you are having trouble leaving a comment for any reason please feel free to email me at the address at the top of my site – but please, try to stick with the nominations through comments so we can keep this process as transparent as possible.

I will also still be doing my regularly scheduled posts throughout the day, so if you don’t see a category as the first post, don’t panic, just scroll down. You of course can also subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up-to-date.

Good luck to everyone.