Webby Awards: Not Televised, Just as Long

It's hard to imagine any media so full of itself that its awards ceremony would take five hours, but that's how long it took this year's (the 10^th annual) Webby Awards to be awarded. The most amazing part is that the award recipients were told to limit their acceptance speeches to five words. And clever words they were.

Arianna Huffington accepted her award with, "Darlings, make blogs, not war." The Washington Post accepted with the words, "deeper than Deep Throat." But since there were 69 categories—everything from Activism to Fashion to Film to Weird—it must have been all that up-and-down from the tables to retrieve awards that took so long.

The ceremony was held in New York on June 12^th after both a people's online vote and a judges' vote. Reports are still streaming in. According to mediabistro's report, The Daily Show's Rob Corddry served as Webby host for the second year in a row and lovingly skewered award winners like Flickr: "Photosharing—is that what you're calling it these days? If that's the case, I used to photoshare the crap out of myself."

MySpace cofounder Chris DeWolfe accepted an award for Breakout of the Year. Thomas Freidman won Person of the Year. Google Earth won for visual design, Flickr for navigation and practices, and The Onion for humor. NPR, JDate, National Geographic, and dozens of others, including plenty of relative unknowns, took home awards. Prince ended the award ceremony by accepting his Lifetime Achievement award with the words "Everything you think…is true," and then launching into song. How many of the winners can you say you've visited?