Why it’s in the Showcase: Shashi Tharoor is a promient figure in Indian politics and has a well-designed website that serves as a hub for his online presence.

Mitchell Baker is the Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet.

Why it’s in the Showcase: As a highly notable person within the Mozilla Foundation (the organization behind the Firefox web browser), Mitchell’s well-designed blog is certainly notable.

Charlie Pratt is a writer and a native of Charlotte, NC. He has recently finished his first memoir, Diary of An American Boy: A Poet Athlete, Stud, and Liar, which will be available for worldwide release in September of 2009.

Why it’s in the Showcase: Charliewrites.com is a vibrant literary hub, built on a gutted and heavily-customized Woothemes template. The site makes creative use of image randomizers to keep the branding and visual content fresh, regularly features multi-author article posts, hosts interactive polls whose data makes its way into Charlie’s published writing, and provides readers with plenty of ways to join in and participate. All content is appropriately tagged based on a researched, creative keyword structure built for long term search results and ranking preservation.

Wyclef Jean is a multi-platinum Haitian-American musician, actor, producer and former-member of the hip hop trio The Fugees.

Why it’s in the Showcase: Wyclef Jean is one of many celebrities using WordPress to power his official blog.

Stopdesign is the creative outlet of Douglas Bowman. I am passionate about design, typography, and the media and tools of my craft. I’m currently Visual Design Lead at Google, where I get to play with and design for products that break new ground, enabling people to connect with information and do things of which they never dreamed.

Why it’s in the Showcase: Douglas is an influential designer who has designed notable sites and products such as Google Calendar and Blogger.

A weblog about the Web and graphic design. Written by Rob Goodlatte, a product designer at Facebook.

Why it’s in the Showcase: Rob’s well-designed WordPress blog and portfolio website features a grid-based design and a non-traditional homepage.

Chris Pirillo is a prolific blogger, YouTube partner, magazine columnist, conference producer, community consultant, and Tech Expert for CNN.com. He is probably best known as the founder of the blog network Lockergnome.

Why it’s in the Showcase: Chris Pirillo’s personal site serves as the center of his prolific online presence.

Josh Shipp is dedicated to one thing: entertaining, inspiring, and empowering teens. He’s written books, shared the stage with Bill Cosby, appeared on MTV’s TRL, Comedy Central, NBC, FOX, TLC, and in the LA TIMES . And he’s already established an international reputation as an inspiring youth speaker with a simple and entertaining, yet challenging message.

Why it’s in the Showcase: Josh’s well-designed and popular website uses WordPress to provide information, solicit and answer questions, and more. It is an excellent implementation of WordPress as a content management system.

Why it’s in the Showcase: Even though blogs are getting more and more common among politicians, they are still relatively uncommon. Bildt’s popular and frequently updated blog is both unique and notable.

John Chow is best known for showing the power of blogging by turning his blog into a case study to prove that you can make money by blogging. John took his blog from zero to making $40,000 per month in just two years. Tens of thousands of people read the John Chow dot Com everyday to find the latest ways to make money by blogging. That, and they want to find out what he had for dinner.

Why it’s in the Showcase: John serves as the quintessential example of the financial power of blogging and has made it his job and his hobby to tell others just how to make the most of blogging.