The Webby Awards can easily be seen as a relic of Internet 1.0. But the “Oscars of the Internet” soldiers on, providing a vital link between the often closed-off world of the Web and the wider culture. The show seems bigger than ever — it was streamed live last night, thanks to a partnership with MLB Advanced Media. The highlights, as in years past, were the five-word acceptance speeches. Some didn’t play ball. Will Ferrell used several more words in a haiku: “Thanks for the award. I will put it in my house next to my instructional poetry books. Thank you.” Others were more succinct. Dan Savage, awarded for his work on the anti-bullying campaign for young gay people, took Tracey Morgan to task for his anti-gay remarks. “Tracey Morgan can suck my…” Savage said. Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, threw the assembled nerds a bone with, “Sometimes geeks can be sexy.” Perhaps the cheekiest speech of the night didn’t come from a star but a representative of Yelp, which has tangled with Web giant Google over its penchant for indexing (some would say copying) Yelp reviews. She said, “Try stealing this content Google.” Hollywood Reporter
Hoax Alert: Another lesson to take much of the Web with a grain of salt. Gay Girl in Damascus, the buzzed-about blog supposedly written by a lesbian in Syria. Well, like so many things on the web, it’s fake, fake, fake. It turns out the blog was written not by Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari, a half-Syrian, half-American woman in Damascus, but by Tom MacMaster, an American graduate student currently enrolled in a medieval studies graduate program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Good job, dude. You should definitely take advantage of the political unrest in Syria and start a fake blog posing as a Syrian lesbian, then pretend that your alter ego was kidnapped by Bashar al-Assad‘s police. Thanks for wasting everyone’s time. NPR
NYC Twitter Capitol: Ugh, come on New Yorkers! This doesn’t make us look very good: stats show that per capita New Yorkers use Twitter more than anyone else, and New York state residents use Twitter 30 percent more than the national average. This will do little to help the nation’s image of New Yorkers as smug narcissists. Business Insider
Relationship Status: Is Mark Zuckerberg engaged? Bill Gates seems to think so; he referred to Zuckerberg’s longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan as ‘his fiancée Priscilla’ in an interview with The Daily Mail. We will have to wait for a FB relationship status update for confirmation. Gawker
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