It was the first awards ceremony held entirely online, and the 31 prizewinners ranged from a US anti-war organization to the space agency NASA.
The Webbys -- "online Oscars" -- included a prize for the weirdest site which went this year to a London-based operation.
In fact the weird site category was dominated this year by British sites.
For six years the Webbys have been held in San Francisco, but this year, with many nominees declaring their reluctance to travel, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) decided to have a rolling 24-hour ceremony online.
More than 180 parties, from Wellington in New Zealand to San Francisco, were arranged, and the organizers declared the experiment a success.
MoveOn.org in the US took the prize for best politics site. It coordinated many of the anti-war protests and in the past week organized more than 600,000 protesters against the loosening of restrictions on media ownership in the US.
Familiar names such as the trading Web site eBay (best services), Google (best news), and ESPN (best sports), took awards and accepted them with the traditional five-word maximum speech, sent in earlier.
"Won Webby; Next: Beat Bush" was MoveOn.org's.
"Mars or Bust; preferably Mars" was the contribution from exploreMarsnow, which won the best science prize.
Parallel awards chosen by the public were also announced, with BBC News Online taking the best news prize.
Rathergood.com, which defies description and is run from London by Joel Veitch, took the fiercely contested weird site award, beating off competition from three other shortlisted British sites.
Otherwise, most of the awards went to US-based sites.
The boom in blogging was recognized by the best practices award to Movable Type, a site that helps people publish their online journals.
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