UK site storms SXSW web awards

The winners celebrate at SXSWi
The winners celebrate at SXSWi

The UK provided the 'Best In Show' at the South by South West show's prestigious Adobe web awards, with Penguin Publishing's 'We Tell Stories' picking up the award.

The publisher's efforts to bring a multimedia spin to its products was seen as an major success in innovation by the judges.

"We Tell Stories is a project launched by publisher Penguin UK, where six authors will write six stories each over the course of six weeks - stories that relate to the immediacy and connectivity of the internet today," explained the official release.

"There is also a mysterious "secret" seventh story involved in the project, which will give readers the chance to win prizes from Penguin UK."

Six to Start

TechRadar caught up with Six to Start's Dan Hom, whose company designed and developed the site.

"It was a collaborative effort," explained Hom. "We worked on the brief in September 2007 and went live in the middle of March 2008.

"They actually approached us. Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin's online publisher, is incredibly forward thinking and his belief in this kind of work is absolutely fantastic.

"It's fantastic. We couldn't have done it without all the authors at Penguin. It was fantastic team effort.

"We're now working on a project with Channel 4, it's coming out in September and it's going to be awesome. It's a project for Channel 4 Education – it's an online game and it's going to be like Skins meet Facebook. We're not allowed to call it an alternate reality game but it's just a really cool game."

Other winners

Flickr picked up the 'Classic' award - with the photo sharing site battling off competition from the likes of Ars Technica and StumbleUpon to pick up the award.

Other winners included Lost Zombies, a collaborative zombie documentary, online US video service Hulu and the Dark Knight Alternate Reality Game.

Patrick Goss

Patrick Goss is the ex-Editor in Chief of TechRadar. Patrick was a passionate and experienced journalist, and he has been lucky enough to work on some of the finest online properties on the planet, building audiences everywhere and establishing himself at the forefront of digital content.  After a long stint as the boss at TechRadar, Patrick has now moved on to a role with Apple, where he is the Managing Editor for the App Store in the UK.