You have a few more weeks to vote in the 2008 Webby Awards, which include three Twin Cities nominees. One of them is geoGreeting, a clever site put together by Jesse Vig of Roseville.

This is the second straight Webby nomination for geoGreeting, in the odd category of NetArt. The site allows users to create greetings using a satellite view of the Earth and uniquely shaped buildings and landmarks to form the letters of the message. You can send the results as an e-card or imbed the URL on a Web page.

“I started geoGreeting because I thought it would be fun and because I wanted to get some web-building experience,” Vig said by e-mail.  ”I had no expectations of anything coming from it.  So getting recognized like this has been a really nice surprise.”
 
Vig, 35, a grad student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Minnesota, said he hasn’t tracked the number of messages sent through his site. But he knows geoGreeting has received 1.25 million visits since it launched in November 2006.   
 
“One thing I’ve learned from the experience is how international the Web is,” he said.  “Most of my traffic these days actually comes from outside of the U.S., as do most of the e-mails I get. It’s also been gratifying to build a community-supported website.  More and more of the letters these days are found by users, and the site would not be what it is today without that help.  I’m always amazed at the amount of time people are willing to contribute.”

The users’ latest finds can be found in the Letter Hunter’s Corner. Recent gems include what looks like a hotel in the Canary Islands that resembles a rounded M from the air and an island near Turkljaca, Croatia, that’s shaped like a heart.

You can vote for geoGreeting and the other two local nominees — Tay Zonday’s Chocolate Rain video and Mono’s The Good Food Fight for General Mills — as well as dozens of other nominees, through May 1 at the Webby Awards ballot site. Winners will be announced May 6.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 7:49 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.