The microblog site Twitter has raised trivial communication to an art form. Inevitably, it has its gala awards ceremony, complete with feuding contestants.  Winners of the first annual Shorty Awards, honoring users of the medium of 140-character messages, or tweets, will gather to honor one another Wednesday evening in Brooklyn. For many, it's a celebration not just of winning, but of surviving the drama of it all.  Elisabeth Moss plays Peggy Olson on AMC's "Mad Men," but someone else has been posting in-character updates on Twitter.  The competition brought to the fore some of the strongest personalities on the site. In at least four of the 26 categories, ranging from Advertising to Weird, there was some sort of public dispute. One finalist was accused of paying people to vote for him. Another used his company's network of accounts to cast hundreds of votes for himself. Still another penned a defiant, 5,700-character blog post—the equivalent of 40 tweets—denouncing the awards as a "high school popularity contest."  More than 30,000 tweeters took part in the competition, which was conceived by a trio of tech entrepreneurs unaffiliated with Twitter. The Shortys come as Twitter traffic is surging. It more than doubled in the last six months of 2008, to 1.9 million users in December, according to comScore.  The voting ended late last month. The winners, who will travel from as far away as Russia and Australia, will give 140-character acceptance speeches. CNN anchor Rick Sanchez will host, and celebrity tweeters, including former rapper MC Hammer, will appear.  The WSJ's Elizabeth Holmes will be live-tweeting the Shorty Awards ceremony, starting Wednesday 7 p.m. ET. Stay tuned at Digits for her updates.  Twitter: A microblog where users can post succinct messages for all the World Wide Web to see  Tweet: A post on Twitter. Tweets must be 140 characters or less.  Twitterers or Tweeters: People who use Twitter  Tweetup: When people who converse on Twitter meet in real life.  @: The symbol used in front of screennames or handles, such as @EHolmesWSJ or @shortyawards  #: A hashtag, or the sign used to indicate a topic, such as #shorty for the Shorty Awards  RT: Re-tweeting, or re-posting another person's tweet  Yes...I'll be at the Shorty's, tweeted @MCHammer.  It may seem a lot of trouble to go to for compositions that don't get a lot wittier, or more literary—or more anything—than that. But collectively, tweets can give a rich impressionistic picture of a gossipy event, like Sunday night's Grammy awards, where both Facebook and Twitter feeds were part of the official program.  What's really got everyone in the contest talking is the identity of @PeggyOlson, after the character in the hit AMC television series "Mad Men." @PeggyOlson is unconnected with the show but tweets in character, corresponding with a full counterpart cast. She took the Advertising category, outraging some of the real-life ad shops in the running.  The votes have been counted and my ad award is official! Never thought this could happen just a few short years ago. The office is a-twitter, tweeted @PeggyOlson.  During the contest, the category's runner-up, @MadMain, mocked @PeggyOlson on his Twitter feed and then pulled an Internet prank called "Rick-Rolling," where he sent her endless pop-ups of a music video featuring 1980s singer Rick Astley.  Dave Saunders, the man behind @MadMain, runs an advertising agency in Richmond, Va. He said they hoped to garner national attention by winning the award. "We lost to a top-rated television program and their agency," Mr. Saunders said in a phone interview, adding: "She's not real."  Three techies, Greg Galant, Adam Varga and Lee Semel, started the contest last fall. Although it has been compared on blogs to the Oscars or the Internet's Webby Awards, the format more closely resembles a democratic election. Rather than recognizing one specific tweet, the organizers broadened the contest to entire accounts.  The trio devised a two-stage voting system, with a first round to determine the finalists and another to crown the victors. The contest did not involve judging by any sort of objective Twitter expert. Nor did it include a comprehensive review of tweets to determine who used the format most effectively.  That setup bothered Melanie Notkin, a 39-year-old entrepreneur known on Twitter as @SavvyAuntie and a finalist in the Brand category. Although Ms. Notkin campaigned actively for herself at the beginning of the competition, she stopped abruptly in mid January.  "The Shorty Awards, while community building at first, have become a little bit of a dirty business for some finalists," she wrote in a lengthy blog post explaining her decision to bow out. "I am sick of how it feeds my ego, making me feel like I am part of a high school popularity contest."  Then Ms. Notkin nodded to her closest competitor, Martha Van Inwegen, known on Twitter as @MarthaVan. "Heard of her?" Ms. Notkin wrote. "I hadn't."  Ms. Van Inwegen, who lives in a remote part of California, began using Twitter to market her product, Action Wipes, cleansing towels for adults. But the service has become "my outside world," she says. Ms. Van Inwegen eventually won the Brand category. She choked up in a phone interview as she talked about the tension surrounding her win and posted an account of the contest on her blog. "While the Shorty Awards are unlike an Oscar, a Nobel Peace Prize or a Super Bowl win," she allowed, "it holds just as great significance for me."  The Shortys did impose a strict set of rules. All votes had to come from an established Twitter account, meaning users couldn't create new ones only to cast a ballot. And voters had to include a reason—any reason at all.  I vote for @charlestrippy in the Shorty Awards Finals for #humor because... he rocks my socks, tweeted @throwsoftjax.  But the tweeters, creative by nature, tried to skirt the rules. Andy Denton, the 34-year-old behind @SportyTweets, a sports news feed service on Twitter, used the company's network of Twitter accounts to cast hundreds of votes for himself in the Sports category. Other tweeters alerted the Shorty Awards people to the strategy, and they removed those votes from the tally.  Mr. Denton, who came in fourth, said he didn't cheat and doesn't think the votes should have been discounted. "It just makes us smarter than them," he said, adding that he has no hard feelings over the loss.  Dan Hollings, a 51-year-old Internet strategist from Tucson known as @dhollings, was accused of paying for votes. Mr. Hollings was in the running for first place for the Social Media category when he saw his vote tally drop from roughly 400 to 100, and asked his followers to vote for him again.  Meanwhile, Dan Zarrella, a 27-year-old Internet marketer from Boston, received an anonymous tip via email. The message pointed Mr. Zarrella, known as @danzarrella and also a finalist in the Social Media category, to a Web site where somebody offered to pay 48 cents to anyone who voted for Mr. Hollings. The person wrote out step-by-step instructions, including "DO NOT post publicly that you are being paid for your work."  Mr. Zarrella alerted the Shorty Awards organizers and wrote a long blog post detailing the offense. Mr. Hollings denies any involvement but says it's possible one of his friends set up the account without his knowledge. He was disqualified from the contest.  Mr. Zarrella ended up winning the category—Mr. Hollings says as a direct result of his own exclusion. Mr. Zarrella brushed off the accusation, saying, "There's a lot of ego that goes into winning an award like this."  The Shorty Award organizers told Twitter, of San Francisco, about the contest only after they launched it. Biz Stone, the 34-year-old co-founder of Twitter, supports the competition, saying Twitter encourages a "go ahead and build it" attitude among users—although he says a scheduling conflict prevents an official Twitter rep from making it to Brooklyn for the Shortys.  I think there are FEW excuses for the twitter founders not to be at shorty awards this Wednesday, tweeted @howardlindzon.  Write to Elizabeth Holmes at elizabeth.holmes@wsj.com
The run-up to tonight's gala Shorty awards ceremony for best Twitterers has been marred by feuds and accusations of vote fraud, with one defiant contestant denouncing it as a