SAN FRANCISCO - TECHNO-SUPERSTARS that brought the world Facebook, Digg, Twitter and other hot websites are among the Internet celebrities honoured by big-time bloggers with first-ever Crunchies awards.

Nearly a thousand devotees of online firms and trends that change cultures around the world gathered in Herbst Theater last week to pay homage to websites voted as the best in online polls.

Popular blogging firms GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch came up with the awards and voting was done via their websites.

"This is a great event for the whole community," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took home Crunchies for best overall website and best founder.

The awards are 36-cm tall plastic statues of a cap-wearing monkey poised to smash television sets and other electronic devices with a bone in a reference to a scene from the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The awards are tributes to Internet entrepreneurs and will hopefully spur risks on 'disruptive technology' that improves lives while making money for creators, according to Venture-Beat editor Matt Marshall.

"People think it's about greed, but we look at it different," Marshall said. "It's go West young man and make your dream, leveraging technology."

Friday's event was the first glitzy Internet start-up love-fest in San Francisco since the Webby Awards began here in 1996 during the famous dot-com boom.

Webby Awards, with winners picked by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, are billed as the Internet's Oscars and the annual ceremony is now held in New York City.

Crunchies award categories included the best place to waste time online. The Time Sink award went to website Kongregate, a treasure trove of online games.

Twitter, which lets people share every moment of their lives in brief text messages, won a Crunchies Award for Best Mobile Start-up.

"My mum is a new Twitter user, which is troubling," GigaOm editor-in-chief Om Malik quipped while handing out the award.

"I think with the iPhone and Google phone and the recent changes in the landscape, finally Silicon Valley is becoming the centre of innovation in that sense. We see more companies that marry the web and mobile."

In a lone tribute to an Internet veteran, a Crunchies Award for Best New Gadget was bestowed on Apple. No one came to claim it.

Instead, Crunchies organisers played a comic video of an Apple chief executive Steve Jobs impersonator mocking 'a stupid plastic monkey award'.

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, proclaimed the proceedings "very cool" while accepting a Crunchies Award for Best User-Generated Content Website.

France-based Netvibes, which helps people manage their online worlds, received a Crunchies Award for Best International Start-Up.

"For me it is like a dream," Netvibes chief operating officer Freddy Mini said as he mingled with other winners.

"All these guys are stars if you like the Internet. It's good to be with them." - AFP

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