Boy, some of them Webby Nominees can come or go and you would never know the difference, right?

Am I right?

Anyway, seeing as the nominees were just announced and we've got David-Michel Davies, the Executive Director for the whole shebang, on AOTS today, we figured we'd give you a little primer of the categories that you actually give a hoot about. Soon, there will be voting, but for now, here are the crucial web site noms:

NETART
Britglyph
Dreamgrove
JacksonPollock.org
Protect 77
Time Spent Alone

GAMES
Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall
Club Penguin
Kongregate
Mafia Wars
Rock Paper Scissors: Extreme Deathmatch

A few years ago before Facebook was widely available to everyone and still confined to students, MySpace was the king of this burgeoning new world of online social networking. My friends and I were first understanding the idea of what having a version of yourself on the internet that anyone could see at any time really meant, when one of the more social among us died suddenly.

It was a traumatic and tragic way that he died but the ever-present geek in me eventually wondered about his MySpace profile. I checked it out. The comments section was jammed full of condolences and "I miss you"s, the most interesting of which were messages from family members and friends who had lost touch. I knew these commenters weren't that connected to him in real life, and it was powerful to see them reach out in a public forum and proclaim their regret and grief over losing someone not yet clear of their twenties. It must have had some therapeutic value for them, like going to a grave and leaving flowers or some other significant object as a gesture of love. Eventually, his profile disappeared.

More recently, a friend of a friend died under similarly tragic circumstances and the same thing happened. His MySpace profile was bombarded with well wishes and for a while an almost daily reminder from his sister, stating how much she loved and missed him. Being curious and slightly removed from the situation, having never met him, I checked the profile every day to see how things unfolded. Eventually I stopped checking as people posted less and less, their grief apparently dwindling and sealing up. Recently, I went to check out the profile and found nothing there. An empty internet void we're all too familiar with when there are no search results. A huge white space where a friend of a friend used to be. My search "did not match any documents."

Are you a millionaire, and are having trouble finding like-minded millionaires to hang with on the internet? Sure, we all are. It's a problem, indeed. Well, look no further, as a new website, affluence.org, is here to help you out with your problem. If you have a verifiable worth of over $3 million, or a household income of over $300,000 a year, you are welcome to join for free, which is good, since it won't put a dent in your considerable savings account.

Not only do you get to e-hang with your close millionaire and billionaire buddies, but you also get free access to a dedicated "Affluence Concierge," though I'm not exactly sure what that means, and 'receive priority access to the world's most exclusive nightclubs, hotels, and restaurants.'  Which is good, right? Because you don't already get that stuff in your real life, so you need a website to handle it for you.

Not every bit of webtoolery on AOTS strikes my fancy. For example, I couldn't care less about what new social network takes the best features from Twitter and Facebook and mashes them up to form a mega social network (most of the time I prefer that even my best friends leave me the hell alone, so I definitely don't need to have a Twitter page). However, today's website-building, Web Tool, Scrapplet is another story entirely.

I'm a photographer and I'm always looking for a cool place to put my photos. However, building my own site has proven difficult and time consuming and I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel this way. If you've ever tried to build a site then you're aware that unless you know html like the back of your hand or own a copy of Dreamweaver, it can be a real pain in the ass to get even minimal results after hours of work.

However, Scrapplet's simple drag and drop interface makes building amazing looking websites a breeze. Heard that before? Of course you have, but I'm telling you, I've used it and seen better results in a shorter period of time than I have using similar "build a website based on a template" services like Squarespace (a Web Tool from last September, which I also use).

This edition of WebTools focuses on the world of stargazing, encouraging you to grab that telescope and look skyward for some hot astronomy action.

Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope is here to give you a window onto the universe, and let you see the stars for much less than the cost of a world-class piece of astronomical equipment.

Check it out.

Today on Webtools, we take a look at a handy-dandy little program that mashes all of your widgets into one. They call it Mash Maker and it's brought to you by Intel.

Normally known for their hardware, Intel is finally breaking into the lucrative widget organizing racket and it sure is convenient to have all those photos of my various ladies linked to their location in Google Maps. Helps me keep it all straight, ya know.

The will to compete is strong in the human animal. In fact, so unyielding is the psychological need to show one’s superiority that there are actually websites dedicated to competitions of skill.

Ibeatyou and Strutta both offer competitors the chance to face off in various events (including beatboxing) by posting videos online.

If you want to find out how to show the world that it needs to respect your mad skills or you just want to see titans go at it, see our profile of the sites in today’s WebTools.

Are you a voyeur? Perhaps you’re someone who is a serious news buff. Either way, you’ll love the site, Live News Cameras. It allows users to view live video streams from news networks all over the country and even the world.

So, whether you want the news or just want to people watch, it’s worth a look. We’ll demo it in today’s show.

Have you ever wanted to do something cool like build a ship in a bottle or overclock your computer processor, but had no idea how? It’s a frustrating feeling.

Let us, or rather, Wonder How To take away your frustration. If you need to know how to do anything from the technical to the artistic, go there first. We’ll show you what a powerful resource it is in today’s WebTools.

Web browsing on cellular phones isn’t all that consumers hoped it would be. There are versions of web pages that you can see on your mobile phone, but it’s hardly the full experience.

However, thanks to a little program called Skyfire all of those graphics and videos you couldn’t see before will be as visible as the sun on a clear day. We’ll demo the amazing mobile app on today’s show!

Forgot your iPod at home? Left your CD compilation in the car? Don’t sweat it. You can still listen to your favorite tunes from any computer with BoomShuffle.

It’s an online service that allows you to create your own playlists and legally stream any song you want for free. It sounds too true to be real, but you’ll walk away a believer after we give you a demo in today’s WebTools.

The reputation of Photoshop precedes it, so we don’t need to talk about all of its great features or about how it’s an extremely useful tool for professional graphic artists and novice users alike.

Nor do we need to mention that it allows users to do everything from photo cropping to inserting pictures of Abe Lincoln into the family portrait.

You know all of that. What we’re going to talk about today is the web app, Photoshop Express, which gives you a great deal of Photoshop’s features for free! Expect a demo in today’s show.

If you have a bunch of friends on different social networks or just have a problem respecting the personal boundaries of others, you’re going to love FriendFeed.

It’s a web based service that not only allows you to track your friends across various social networks, it gives you the ability to keep tabs on every web link, video and mp3 (or whatever) your friends share with others. Sure, it’s a little creepy, but undeniably useful.

We’ll show you how this latest innovation in social networking/stalker tech works in today’s WebTools.

Have the same five websites that you kill time on gotten so boring that you’re actually starting to prefer work to goofing off? That simply should not be. Sirs, you should be able to enjoy not working at work! We know you’d rather be at home playing on your console, but since you can’t go home at mid-day to play, why not bring console gaming to you?

We’re not talking about sneaking your Wii, Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 past your boss and co-workers. No, we speak of a gaming website, Instant Action, that brings the joy of console gaming to you. It may sound too good to be true, but we’ll prove it to you in today’s WebTools.

Rock Band and Guitar Hero are the hottest games on the market right now and it’s no mystery why. They totally allow you to transform yourself into this legendary musician for a while. You know what sucks though, once the game is over, that’s it.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could learn to rock out for real and, what’s more, learn from the very rock stars that made the songs famous? You can now, thanks to iVideosongs. We’ll show you how you can become a real guitar hero in today’s WebTools.