Announcing the Huffington Post Contagious Festival

The Contagious Festival is a unique opportunity for talented designers, political activists, filmmakers, comics, and everyone else to reach millions of people with creative, viral online work. The Huffington Post is expanding our pool of contributors beyond bloggers and we are looking for contributors with creative ideas that could become the next JibJab, Numa Numa dance, Detroit Project or Black People Love Us. The contestants that create the best projects get Internet fame, prize money, and the chance to meet with friends of the Huffington Post from the worlds of entertainment and politics to discuss future projects and opportunities.

The first round of entries will go live starting February 1st, but you can enter now to reserve a spot on the official Contagious Festival server:

ENTER THE CONTAGIOUS FESTIVAL

You simply create an account, build your project on the server and launch your site. Then you can watch the live rankings to see if your entry is being forwarded, linked, and IMed around the Internet.

Each month, the most popular entry will win the "People's Choice Award" and the "Jury Prize" will be selected by a panel including Noah Baumbach, John Cusack, Nora Ephron, The Yes Men, Jeremy Zimmer, Arianna Huffington, and Jim Bankoff.

We hope you will participate in the Contagious Festival by becoming a contributor or forward this post to friends who are designers, filmmakers, comics, political activists, or anyone else with the potential to create the next big online hit. For more information, visit the Festival site.