The Peabodys, administered out of the University of Georgia, date back to 1941, and honor “the most outstanding achievements in electronic media, including radio, television and cable.” They tend to go to earnest television documentaries and the like, but they also allow for some very smart, quirky stuff.

Hence the award for the weekly’s “Onion News Network” video site, which debuted two years ago but has really been hitting its stride lately (disclosure: I’m pals with some Onion people). Per the judges: “The satirical tabloid’s online send-up of 24-hour cable-TV news was hilarious, trenchant and not infrequently hard to distinguish from the real thing.”

Other winners include the New York Times’s (NYT) excellent Web site, CBS’s (CBS) “60 Minutes” and… “Lost,” from Disney’s (DIS) ABC. But none of those are as fun to embed as Onion clips.

Here’s the Onion’s most recent effort:

Morning Show Host Starts Charity to Rid World of Flying Debris

And here’s a beauty that, like some other Onion stories, got digested as bonafide news in some places:

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

And while this one isn’t technically an Onion clip, I’ve always enjoyed its many meta qualities:

ComScore says that traffic to the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC fell 10.8 percent from October to November, dropping from 5.3 million unique visitors to 4.8 million. (Hulu’s PR team notes that ComScore’s separate “VideoMetrix” panel assigned a much bigger audience to the site last month: 24 million uniques. They haven’t put out November numbers yet but I’ll update when I get them).

ComScore (SCOR) says U.S. traffic at Google’s (GOOG) YouTube also dropped that month, but by a much smaller margin–0.006 percent. And since YouTube is a global property, those numbers are less telling. Hulu, meanwhile, is a U.S.-only site (much to the dismay of blog commenters).

Apologies for not figuring out how to show you this data in graph form–I’ll figure it out eventually. For now, click to enlarge.

This makes plenty of sense: Hulu was one of two places were you could (legally) see the “Saturday Night Live” Sarah Palin clips, which were huge sensations. The other one, NBC.com, dropped a whopping 50 percent–from 14.1 million to 7.2 million, comScore says.

And all sorts of Web sites that enjoyed a bump during the run-up to the election have tailed off a bit since then. ComScore says the Huffington Post, for instance, is down 20 percent– from five million uniques to four million. Presumably Oak Investment Partners was aware of that before it sank $25 million into the site last month.

Meanwhile, Hulu still shows impressive growth. If I could have figured out how to create a graph, you’d see that Hulu has still had a huge run-up since March, when it left beta.

Speaking of beta, video site/blog punching bag Joost has logged its first full month of traffic since its Web video player became open to the public. ComScore pegs traffic at 1.1 million uniques; the company says that its data, which include global traffic, show 2.1 million.

Those aren’t huge numbers–I can think of several text-only blogs, which cost a lot less to build and operate than Joost’s site, that garner more eyeballs than that–but they’re not terrible either. Still, Joost has a lot of ground to catch up if it wants to give Hulu a run for its money.

Last but not least! Here’s an excellent clip from the smart folks at the Onion. It’s a month old, but news to me. Enjoy:

That appears to be the conclusion that visitors to GNR’s MySpace page, where the album is being streamed in its entirety, have reached. Lots of people are showing up at the page, which encourages them to preorder the album, which goes on sale exclusively at Best Buy (BBY) on Tuesday. But few of them are sticking around to actually listen to the whole thing.

Glenn Peoples at Coolfer has actually plotted out the song-by-song streaming results. The numbers in Glenn’s chart, below, are a day or so old at this point, but they’re directionally accurate: Only about 20 percent of the visitors to the page are sticking around to hear the whole album.

What to make of that? Probably an Occam’s Razor answer: People check out the page out of curiosity, hear the first few songs (the title track plays automatically when you load the page), and decide they stink.

More charitable answer: Web music fans in 2008 just don’t listen to entire albums, period. Glenn makes a nod toward this by noting that people who have checked out the MySpace page for the new Paul McCartney album also flit away after a track or two. Perhaps News Corp.’s (NWS) social network just isn’t the place to stream more than a couple songs. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)

But I’m going with the first explanation: These may be Guns N’ Roses songs, but they’re not good Guns N’ Roses songs.

Remember those? Here’s one, from way, way back in 1991, which as I recall was the tail end of the band’s heyday.

Would you like a professional reviewer’s take on the new album. No problem: Chuck Klosterman takes a crack at it in The Onion. And while we’re addressing all things Axl, a question for MediaMemo readers: Does anyone remember “White Trash Wins Lotto,” the excellent GNR-meets-Gilbert & Sullivan production from about a decade ago? I can still remember the songs, but can’t find them anywhere. Any help, either in comments or via email, much appreciated: peter@allthingsd.com.