Shock-jock Howard Stern won a renegade award and freelance journalist Kevin Sites got a nod for blogging as Wired Magazine doled out the 6th Annual Rave Awards to technology innovators.
Wired bestowed Stern with the "Wired Renegade" award for his tense battle with the Federal Communications Commission and upcoming switch to Sirius Satellite Radio. Stern has blamed the ever-tightening decency controls for his decision to abandon broadcast radio in favor of an emerging medium that is, at least for now, beyond the FCC's reach.
Sites took home the honor in a new "Blogger" category for helping pioneer a new breed of reporting from the war in Iraq.
Sites, a freelance journalist currently on assignment for NBC News in Asia, also chronicled on his Web journal the tsunami rescue effort in southeast Asia.
Brad Bird won in the "Film Director" category for "The Incredibles," the computer animation story of a family of superheroes.
Other winners included Burt Rutan in the industrial designer category for SpaceShipOne, which last year captured the $10 million Ansari X Prize and energized the quest for commercial human spaceflight.