Hey everyone, we’re now roughly half-way through the voting process. We’ve got some great apps in the running this year. The top of the leaderboard really looks fantastic.

We’ve also seen a generous amount of media coverage for competitors and their apps, including articles at SitePoint, TechCrunch, and Mashable. Welcome to all our new judges that found us through those sources. I hope you enjoy checking out some brand new web properties and helping us determine who deserves to take home the prizes. If you know other folks who may be interested, please invite them! Anyone can vote. Selection is a collaborative process and the more opinions we have, the better. Remember that a random selection of judges will also win Amazon gift certificates, so there’s a little bit of extra motivation!

As an additional bit of housekeeping, note that we have had to disqualify a few teams for rule violations. If you have reason to believe that an entry has violated the rules, please contact us directly rather than just giving them low scores in your ballots because you suspect something. We will investigate any allegations brought to us that have merit.

Before I go I’d also like to call your attention to a number of special offers being offered to participants through our sponsors. If you log into your account and view the user profile, those offers are listed in the right hand column. Thanks again to Linode, JanRain, RailsKits, and the other companies who are offering special discounts on their services to our judges and participants. You can find some awesome savings here on hosting, a free version of JanRain’s RPX service (for easy OpenID integration), and much more.