To be nominated alongside the world's largest and best known Internet sites, and to be named one of the top five news sites for 2003, is an achievement we celebrate," says Amadou Mahtar Ba, president of AllAfrica Global Media. "That this honor has gone to an African organization pearl earrings is particularly gratifying, at a time when African issues are too often under-reported."

Akwe Amosu, AllAfrica's Executive Editor/Producer, says that the award also honors the 100 African media organizations whose reporting appears on the site. "Every day," she says, our readers around the world can access what people all over Africa are saying about themselves, their wheat pearl and their concerns. For that unique voice, we are indebted to the editors, reporters and publishers who make it possible." The AllAfrica site posts over 800 stories daily from its participating publications and from its own prize-winning journalists.

This is the second year in a row that allAfrica.com has been nominated for Best News. AllAfrica Global Media, the site's producer, is a systems technology developer pearl jewelry and the leading source of news and information about Africa worldwide. In addition to producing allAfrica.com, AllAfrica distributes through mobile and wireless devices as well as to clients such as LexisNexis, Bloomberg, Comtex, Financial Times and Factiva (Reuters and Dow Jones), which reach tens of millions of end users.

Washington, DC — AllAfrica shared a virtual stage with international media powerhouses at the annual Webby Awards, as one of five nominees for Best News Site of 2003. The awards were presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences during a live webcast from San pearl jewelry Francisco on June 5.

Google's news site won the top award in the news division, and the BBC's English-language world news site garnered the most votes in the People's Voice competition. The other three nominees were AllAfrica Global Media's news site allAfrica.com, the MSNBC site, a joint venture of  wheat pearlNBC and Microsoft, and the Romanesko media news site of the Poynter journalism institute.

The Webby Awards have become the leading honor for web sites, recognizing achievements in technology and creativity in 30 categories. This year's winners include Amazon for Commerce, NASA Earth Observatory for Education, Planned Parenthood for Health, MoveOn.org for pearl earrings Politics, eBay for Services, ESPN.com for Sports, Lonely Planet for Travel and Apache Web Server for Technical Achievement.

Nominees hailed from 25 countries, among them the United States, Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Canada, and Germany. AllAfrica was the only Africa site nominated.

Xymbol is a technology services provider, offering companies, organizations and institutions access to highly-customized, efficient, cost-effective development and deployment of internet-based systems and applications. Xymbol is committed to providing solutions that pearl earrings boast very low total costs of ownership. A key factor in achieving this low TCO is Xymbol's effective use of leading open source software, such as the Linux operating system and the Apache web server. Xymbol's own application development platform, XML::Comma, is freely available under the GNU General Public License.

Xymbol is a division of AllAfrica Global Media, a technology company based in Washington, DC, with offices in five countries. The XML::Comma platform was wheat pearl developed to power AllAfrica's media aggregation and syndication business. AllAfrica's website, http://allafrica.com, hosts content from more than 100 publishers, and AllAfrica's commercial distribution services feed news to hundreds of clients worldwide. In addition, some 400 websites depend on the free "AllAfrica Headlines" service, which uses JavaScript widgets to pull news stories from an XML::Comma server.

Xymbol was established in January 2001 by the pearl jewelry AllAfrica board of directors and is managed by professionals with more than 20 collective years of web-development experience.

As an application development platform, XML::Comma offers programmers a foundation upon which to build complex, dynamic business logic components. Comma's major strength is in supporting web development, but modern web systems require back-end tools that integrate pearl jewelrywith legacy, intranet and desktop applications and interfaces, and XML::Comma was designed with this interoperability in mind. Comma modules can be embedded inside the Apache web server, but are equally at home supporting autonomous server-side processes, providing data access and modelling for GUI applications, or running in on-demand utility contexts.

XML::Comma's developer-friendly architecture treats XML documents as members of structured collections, and allows systems designers to define document types using a mixture of XML and Perl. The document "life-cycle" is completely controlled by calls into the Perl API, and pearl earringscommon functionality can be packaged into Perl hooks that are embedded directly into document definitions. Support is provided for multi-definition "includes" and dynamic compilation of embedded subroutines, and the system can be extended in either Perl or C through a simple, flexible interface.

Comma manages the low-level transformation of data wheat pearl into structured information, exporting an API that handles much of the detail work inherent in creating, categorizing, sorting, searching, and storing chunks of data. The platform is available for download from http://xymbollab.com.

Washington, DC -- Xymbol, a leading provider of internet application development services, today announced the 1.0 release of its flagship XML::Comma platform.

XML::Comma is a full tool-kit for internet wheat pearl programmers, providing a rich API and an extensive set of facilities that speed the development of information-heavy, network-centric, web-enabled systems. Comma's abstraction layer bridges the tricky double divide between XML documents, program objects and relational database tables.

XML::Comma is distributed as open source software under the GNU General Public License, and has been designed to work hand-in-glove with other important open source tools such as the Apache web server, the HTML::Mason templating environment, and the Linux operating pearl jewelry system. Comma's support for relational databases is modular and extensible; both of the leading open source RDBMS platforms -- MySQL and PostgreSQL -- are supported.

The 1.0 release of XML::Comma coincides with the debut of www.democrats.org, the Democratic National Committee's expanded website. The DNC chose XML::Comma as the platform for Chairman Terry McAuliffe's new technology initiative -- an integrated development project pearl earrings designed to extend the reach and effectiveness of the party's communications infrastructure. The new www.democrats.org site serves dynamic, issues-oriented content to a national audience, and enables the Democratic Party to connect with its members in immediate, targeted, and customizable ways.