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The gang at Treehugger.com -- an environmental network founded by Canadian entrepreneur Graham Hill -- may never win an Oscar, but now they've done the next best thing: their site has won a Webby, an award handed out by the impressively named International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (which isn't affiliated with the actual Oscars, despite the similar name).

The Webby Awards may not have designer dresses or Oscar-style acceptance speeches -- in fact, Webby winners are famously restricted to just five words -- but they are beginning to rival the "real" Oscars for sheer numbers.

This year, there are more than 130 trophies being handed out, including awards for best use of animation and for religion and spirituality. In what some might see as an ominous sign, the number of awards exceeds the 110 that the Academy handed out in 1999, not long before the technology bubble peaked.

The IADAS, whose judges include Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, online media mogul Arianna Huffington and Simpsons creator Matt Groening, added a video awards segment for the first time this year. Jessica Rose won Best Actress for her role in the YouTube sensation Lonelygirl15, and the unnamed individual behind the popular website Ask A Ninja won Best Actor.

Treehugger.com won a "People's Voice" Webby (the Webby version of the People's Choice awards) in the "cultural blog" category.

Treehugger was founded by Quebec-born Hill, a Carleton University grad and founder of web-design firm Sitewerks, and the site's president and chief operating officer is Ken Rother, a Canadian who co-founded Mountain Lake Software with Bill Tapscott in the early 1990s.

"The recognition is really nice," Mr. Rother said Tuesday. "There were a lot of emails flying around here about it. One person said that this is actually better than an Oscar because there's no camera on you when you lose."

Treehugger has been nominated in previous years but this is its first win. Mr. Rother said the site got more than 3.8 million page views in April, up from 2 million in December, and had 1.4 million unique visitors.

This year, recipients of special "lifetime achievement" Webby awards include musician David Bowie and eBay CEO Meg Whitman, both of whom will reportedly be attending the gala ceremony in New York on June 5th, along with YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

The Webbys began as a side project by a magazine called The Web in the bubble years of the mid-1990s. They were originally a small-scale event, and even ceased to exist for a couple of years after the tech bubble popped.

At that point, the International Academy for Digital Arts and Sciences was formed to take over the awards, and the march towards Oscar-style status began. The Academy was created by International Data Corp., publisher of technology magazines such as PCWorld (which recently folded) and Computerworld.

The awards are often referred to as "the Oscars of the Internet," a phrase that in Webby Awards press releases is credited to the New York Times, although the Academy itself seems to have coined the phrase.