Arcade Fire's interactive online film The Wilderness Downtown has won the FWA Site of the Year Award for 2010.

The site, which was created by director Chris Milk (of production company @radical.media) in collaboration with Aaron Koblin of Google Creative Lab and digital production company B-Reel, was made to promote the track We Used To Wait from Arcade Fire's recent album The Suburbs. It was chosen by the judges as the best site of the year, from a shortlist of 12 sites, the favourites chosen each month on the FWA site.

The Wilderness Downtown site utilises Google Maps to take viewers on a personal journey to their own home town, combining this imagery with pre-recorded footage which appears in different pop-up windows. It is an absorbing, and surprisingly emotional, piece of work.

"We are honored to have been included among such a fantastic set of websites," says Aaron Koblin of the win. "This has surely been another amazing year for creativity and innovation on the web. Undoubtedly, the growing adoption of HTML5 and advanced JavaScript via modern browsers will keep pushing the Web forward and bring new, never-before seen experiences to users in the coming months. We are proud to have worked with such an incredibly talented team of people. We will keep trying to push the browser to its limits in 2011, so stay tuned!"

Visit the Wilderness Downtown site here.

While The Wilderness Downtown may have charmed the judges, those voting in the FWA People's Choice Award had other ideas, voting instead for Stink Digital's absorbing website Dark Ride for Lexus cars. The site invites visitors to play a role in a 12-minute action film, asking players to connect to their Facebook accounts and use their webcams to add to the immersion. A film promoting the site is shown above, but visit darkersideofgreen.com/dark-ride for the full experience.

More info on FWA is at thefwa.com.