The ceremony, which surprisingly breezed by with comic relief at every turn, crowned We Tell Stories — the digital fiction site from Penguin — with the top honor of Best of Show, and Lost Zombies — the community-generated zombie documentary — as champions in the People's Choice category.
Thurston introduced the event with an opening monologue that rivaled comedic performances at more mainstream awards shows, but with a Web twist that was certainly crowd appropriate. Chris Brogan's video on saying hi at events became a meme of its own with Thurston's own mockingly mean response.
And even Mashable wasn't able to escape Thurston's wit, as he profoundly recounted the genius (or lack thereof) of the Skittles social media campaign, giving us credit for a provocative screenshot complete with expletives from the Skittles tweeting masses.
I was able to chat with both Lost Zombies and We Tell Stories immediately following show. Ryan Leach of Lost Zombies explained that, "We're 3 guys trying to find a new way to make a movie, and its humbling to have our movie accepted by the community."
In a similar humble fashion, the We Tell Stories team had no idea that they were even selected for the Best of Show award (they had just been awarded the Experimental award), and took the stage asking the crowd what award they had won.
In case you missed the event, the full list of winners is listed below:
Activism: Tweet Congress
Amusement: Addictionary
Art: Things I have learned in My Life, So Far
Blog: The Bygone Bureau
Business: JasMax
CSS: Project Miso
Classic: Flickr
Community: Lost Zombies
Educational Resource: The Cycle
Experimental: We Tell Stories
Film/TV: Hulu
Games: Why So Serious
Mobile: Gigotron
Motion Graphics: NVIDIA Speak Visual
Music: James Zabiela
Personal Portfolio: Ali Felski
Student: Modernity Spirit of Experimentation
Technical Achievement: Aviary
People's Choice: Lost Zombies
Best of Show: We Tell Stories
We find that all of the winners, and even the nominees, are all deserving of recognition and look forward to seeing more great things come from each of them in the next year.