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The Shorty Awards, held recently in DUMBO, Brooklyn, was one of the few occasions where mobile texting at a nightclub was just as socially acceptable as talking face to face. That was because the night top "tweeters," or users of text messages, in the microblogging phenomenon known as Twitter, which is available at Twitter.com.

"Short form messages have always been powerful - Ten Commandments, ten short form messages. Shakespeare, all the people we remember for quotes they've said," said Sawhorse Media organizer Gregory Galant. "Now on the web, Twitter has made it really easy to distribute these short form messages. It's bubbled up, more than six million people are using Twitter, so it's time to see who's actually good at it.

"It was a democratic process, we had 50,000 public votes on Twitter.com - who's the best about writing about given topics, be it science, or news," continued Galant.

True to Twitter form, winners had to keep acceptance speeches to just 140 characters.

"I think there's a marriage potential, if not a consummation already between old and new media, and I think I may have accidentally found it," said Sanchez.

Of course, any good awards night has its fair share of controversy, and detractors of the Shorty Awards have griped about how the winners were chosen.

In fact, The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece detailing many of those detractor's allegations, from ballot box-stuffing to paying for votes.

"That sounds like a criticism of U.S. democracy right? Anything that's democratic, you get all kinds of things that are messy," said Galant. "But we did our best to sort through it. It was all open, so even unlike a public election, you can read through every single vote that someone got and see if it's legit or not."

To see a full list of the nominees and winners you can check out ShortyAwards.com.