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Webby Awards Announce Finalists

From the practical to the playful, scores of Web sites vie for recognition, including the People's Choice award.

James Niccolai, IDG News Service

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Dust off the feather boa, the Webbys are coming around again.

The International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences has announced the nominees for the fifth annual Webby Awards, which is billed as the Oscars of the Internet and pays tribute to some of the most creative, informative, and just plain wacky sites on the Web.

Members of the public can vote for the People's Choice Awards at the Webbys site from April 30 through July 4.

In addition, a panel of judges will vote on the Webby Awards themselves, which encompass 135 nominees in 27 categories. The nominations by the 350-member International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences heavily favor English-language, United States-centered sites, perhaps contrary to the notion of a World Wide Web. They were submitted as part of an open call for nominations.

Judges of the finalists include entertainment icons such as David Bowie and Francis Ford Coppola, television chef Julia Child, New Age author Deepak Chopra, and cartoonist Matt Groening.

Winners Webcast This Summer

The winners will be announced at a ceremony on July 18, which will be Webcast from San Francisco's opulent War Memorial Opera House.

Webby Awards Founder and Director Tiffany Shlain downplays the past year's dot-com fizzle and says the quality of entries is as high as ever. There's a "certain disconnect" between the downturn in the economy and the fact that more consumers than ever are accessing the Internet, she says.

"I really believe that in challenging times it forces people to do better work," she says. "In many ways the Web is going back to its roots. The people who were in it just to get rich quick have gone ... and we're left with some really creative people who've been here for a long time."

Although the Webbys are often compared to the Oscar ceremony hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the trademark of the online awards is irreverence.

More than 3000 technology industry figures are expected to attend the annual awards ceremony. Outrageous fashions are frequent at both the Oscars and the Webbys, for example. But at the San Francisco fete, a gown made of CD-ROMs would not be a surprise; you're unlikely to spot such garb at the movie industry gathering in Los Angeles. However, like the older awards, the voting process is audited by an accounting firm, in the Webbys' case PricewaterhouseCoopers.

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