MTV’s A Thin Line — a campaign to “stop the spread of digital abuse in your life and amongst your peers” — won the top Youth site award. By the way, A Thin Line has an aggressive social media presence spanning Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and… MyYearbook, where it has 63,000 fans.

For all the Webby winners, go here. And congrats everyone!

The innovative folks at the Las Vegas Sun won the general excellence award for a medium site, as well as for video journalism. The non-profit startup TexasTribune.org won overall excellence for small site.

NPR grabbed the Gannett Award for Technical Innovation (for its NPR API) as well as the award for outstanding use of emerging platforms for its work on mobile devices. CNN.com won for breaking news (Haiti) and best blog reporting (CNN Technology) — and they should win an award for the most innovative acceptance speech: playing a video on an iPad.

Other winners include NYTimes.com, VoiceofSanDiego.org and ProPublica, among others. Congrats everyone! Full list of winners here.

By the way, no local TV sites were nominated this year, and few usually enter. And all the finalists for the online video journalism awards were newspaper sites. The Toronto Star won the large site award in that category.

(Full disclosure: I work at msnbc.com.)

“Everyone who’s part of West Seattle Blog – as a reader, commenter, tipster, writer, photo-sharer, Forums member, sponsor, events-calendar-item-sender, ANYTHING – is a finalist for a national award!” writes editor Tracy Record on the site today. By the way, West Seattle Blog has a HUGE social media following: nearly 8,000 on Twitter and another 5,000+ on Facebook. It’s also interesting to point out that of the four startup finalists mentioned above, only the West Seattle Blog is a for-profit venture (and it is profitable.)

On the social media front, the Associated Press is a finalist for a Technical Innovation award with its multiplatform style guide, which includes a popular Twitter account (not to be confused with the other one). CNN is also up for the same award for its work with its iPhone app, which integrates submissions to CNN iReport.

“We were struck this year by the increase in the quality and quantity of strong investigative work,” said Anthony Moor, Lead Local Editor at Yahoo!, who, along with AP’s Ruth Gersh, co-chairs the Online Journalism Awards Committee. “As digital news comes of age, journalists are finding inventive ways to honor the core values of their craft.”

Finalists for the large site overall excellence award include msnbc.com (where I work), NPR.org, NYMag.com and NYTimes.com.

It’s certainly worth carving out some time to visit the links on the finalists page — some great work in there. Congrats and good luck everyone!