Video Stars at Webby Awards

The Webby award winners were announced today, and the “Online Film and Video” categories are packed with familiar faces. There’s a mix of old media digital teams, well-funded new media startups and indie kids who went for broke online.

To give a sense of how video ranked this season, the “Person of the Year” award went to Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube, and new “Best Actor” and “Best Actress” awards went to Ask a Ninja and Lonelygirl15, respectively.

Part publicity stunt, part promotional vehicle, and all for profit, the Webby awards have been a consistent source of snark here in San Francisco — though I’ve never known anyone to turn one down. And certainly every winner is entirely deserving. This years crop of winners includes a bunch of NewTeeVee favorites, from Pink Broadcasting’s “HugNation” to Kevin Sites’ “HotZone.”

It’s also a great way to catch up on the broader web zeitgeist. Note the self-referential quality of the people’s pick for the Animation category, Alan Becker’s “Animator vs. Animation II” on AtomFilms, with jokes about the Flash interface only an internerd could love. The judge’s choice, “Battle of the Record Covers,” is rife with Gen X references maybe lost on the Millenials at MySpace.

For a crowd likely stuck behind computers all day, the teams at JETSET and Cool Hunting do all the work of actually leaving the house and finding the latest hottness for you. Here, Zadi Diaz of JETSET runs down the nerd cool news you need to know and thanks fans and supporters for their help winning the People’s Choice for Music and Variety.

To give you an idea of where the sweet spot lies between offline and online popularity, one of the winners that pulled down both an award from the judges and the voters was NBC’s series of webisodes for “The Office.” Not too broad, not too niche, the premise attracts an audience both online and off. Kind of like the Webby awards.