Shona Ghosh

The Webby Awards winners are in, with relatively few surprises I think. You can view the full list here, though this year’s 5 word speeches will have to wait til the awards ceremony which isn’t actually held until June. You’ll be able to watch it on YouTube though. Big ‘of the year’ wins were NIN frontman Trent Reznor for artist (woo!), comedian Jimmy Fallon for person, Twitter for breakout and Sarah Silverman for best actress. Would’ve picked Tina Fey myself, but whatever.

Worth checking out is the beautiful net-art category winner, Dreamgrove. Users are invited to ‘plant’ their dreams in a virtual field, while visitors can viewers these dreams categorised by mood, colour, name, word or date. People’s choice winner was the slightly sillier JacksonPollock.org, which can only be described as SPLAT.

Another art project, Jason Nelson’s Digital Oddities, topped the ‘weird’ category. I haven’t finished exploring it yet and I’ve yet to decide whether it’s beautiful or just odd. New media artist Jason Nelson assembles a patchwork collection of…well, new media art. Think of those Guardian Datablog visualisations but to the power of 100. There’s something for gamers, surrealists and amateur YouTubers. If that’s too taxing on the brain, there’s always the delightfully snarky FAIL blog.

In politics, the HuffPost took the main prize, while US political journalism site FactCheck was popular among the people. Wordle nabbed best use of typography after ridiculous overusage by the global press (including me). Just to remind you, here were my predictions:

Best newspaper

I predicted….New York Times to pip Guardian.

Winner Guardian

People’s choice New York Times (so half a point, surely)

Best news

I predicted…The Huffington Post

Winner BBC Worldwide

People’s choice BBC Worldwide

Podcast

I predicted…Guardian

Winner Guardian

People’s choice NPR Podcasts. No, no idea who they are either.

Jason Nelson’s award winner for weird.