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The finals of our annual Open Web Awards are hotly contested, with 170,000+ votes cast since Wednesday. Among the most active categories: the top videos and channels on YouTube.

Popular YouTube channel CardGamesFTW has a strategy to help it beat out the competition: turtles. At least, a humorous clip linking turtles, Facebook and people called “Steve” aspires to drive more votes for the channel ...

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof is controversially asking web users to “Boycott Bing“, claiming that Bing is censoring Simplified Chinese queries even outside the People’s Republic of China.

Last night, Bing responded to Kristof’s Friday afternoon posting, citing a programming bug but failing to deny the censorship claims.

To us, both sides of the argument seem lacking.

Boycott Bing?

Google has already transitioned GrandCentral users over to Google Voice, and now comes the final step in that move: Google is shuttering the GrandCentral website and telling users to download any old messages and contacts they have on that site. The GrandCentral site will be closed on the last day of the year – December 31st – and a further reminder will be sent before that date.

In a mail to ...

Social media is a double-edged sword. Due to its unfiltered nature, it can be a powerful promotional tool. However, it can also publicly expose our problems. Former reality TV star Tila Tequila is an unfortunate but prime example.

Some backstory: Tila Tequila is one of the most popular artists on MySpace, was the subject of an MTV reality show, and most recently filed assault charges against Sa...

We’ve been matching up popular web services, applications and mobile apps against each other in heated one-on-one battles here in our weekly Faceoff Series. Last week Microsoft Office bested Google Docs in a head to head race for the title of office suite champion.

This week we turned our attention to a rather timely battle being waged on the mobile front, between Apple’s still wildly-selling iPho...

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Fido Factor

Quick Pitch: Fido Factor is a dog-specific local search and review site and iPhone app built for dog owners. It’s a “Yelp for dogs...

When it was released earlier this month, the retail price for the Motorola Droid was $200 for new activations on Verizon. Although Verizon is staying firm with that price point for now, it appears that some of its retailers are not.

Specifically, Amazon and Dell have both cut prices on the smartphone to $150 and $120, respectively. The news comes just one day after news broke of price cuts by o...

Each Friday we choose a Lunchtime Poll topic to get a sense of how Mashable readers feel about the chosen topic of the week. Below are the results from last Friday’s poll, where we asked for your favorite news reader.

Is your favorite app or service not represented in the list? Let us know in the comments! And to make sure your vote counts next time, be sure to vote in this week’s Lunchtime Poll, ...

Susan Payton is the Managing Partner of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, an internet marketing firm. She blogs at The Marketing Eggspert Blog, and teaches marketing courses at Marketing EggSchool. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing.

We’re a week away from Black Friday and just a few years ago, if you wanted to find the best deals, you had to wait for the sales flyers to hit your newspaper or ma...

It’s Friday, people, which means that not only is it Follow Friday, it’s also time for the Lunchtime Poll! Last week we wanted to know about your favorite news reader (or whether you use RSS at all). We’ll have the results for you later today, but let’s get a head start on the new poll: what’s your favorite video sharing service?

We’ll start off with some responses from the staff here at Mashable,...

Thanks to this week’s advertisers and partners for enabling us to bring you the latest social media news and resources. Mashable’s sponsors are as social media savvy as our readers!

Advertise with us and get noticed.

Help us to help you. Mashable is seeking out site sponsors for our large, diverse audience — social media users, venture capitalists, early adopters, developers, bloggers, and many m...

Hot on the heels of the launch of the Windows desktop app preview, Seesmic has brought its Twitter client to the mobile arena as well with the launch of clients for the Android and BlackBerry platforms. Both apps are available for free — get the Android version from the Android Market and the BlackBerry version by pointing your BlackBerry to Seesmic.

We had a chance to test out the Android build o...

Some of the recent numbers being put up by live video events on the Web are giving TV a run for its money. Take for example the New Moon Premiere, which attracted 3 million viewers in total, a U2 concert on YouTube that reached 10 million, and the red carpet event for This Is It, which saw 1.8 million tune in.

Today, we have yet another big number to share, this time from last night’s Ustream pr...

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Every year consumers turn to the web to scour for the best holiday shopping deals. Black Friday has practically become a holiday of its own, with retailers jumping on the bandwagon earlier than ever to satisfy deal-hungry co...

Twilight-mania just won’t stop! More than 400 million “New Moon” videos have been viewed online, the film is expected to beat all midnight opening records, and Twitter continues to be abuzz with “New Moon” chatter.

On Wednesday, we reported that more than 81,000 tweets were sent out about “New Moon,” most of them positive. So how did the Twitteratti respond to the debut of “New Moon” last night? O...

Here’s a neat new feature we noticed on our Facebook Page this morning: the ability to target updates to users in specific locations or users who access the site in a specific language.

You can imagine this being useful for situations in which you’re promoting an event, or, posting content in multiple languages. By targeting only those that an item is applicable to, you reduce your chances of ove...

New Moon might go down as one of the biggest movies of the year, but it’s also quickly becoming one of the biggest online events ever, at least in the world of online video.

Visible Measures, which tallies what it calls the “True Reach” of an online video (the original, official trailers, copies of the trailers, fan-made trailers, fan commentary, etc.), now reports that New Moon is the second big...

In the month or so since Twitter started rolling out its Twitter Lists feature, a number of web and Adobe AIR based clients have added support for it.

However, we haven’t seen any native Twitter apps support Lists. Today Realmac Software released Socialite Beta 3 for Mac OS X, including, among other enhancements — basic list support. Realmac acquired Socialite (then named EventBox) back in October...

It’s almost time for Thanksgiving, and that means family traditions. But what if your family doesn’t really have any, or you simply want to start your own new ones? This might be the year where it’s your turn to up the heat and put together a Thanksgiving feast. With social media and the web, we’re lucky to have everything we need at our fingertips, through videos, online invitations, and online ...

Sony is one of world’s best known brands when it comes to home electronics, gadgetry, and entertainment.

However, the landscape has changed in recent years. You can have the best media player around, but if you don’t offer users a place where they can easily get content for it, it won’t be competitive. And it’s been proven twice (first with the iPod, then with the iPhone) by Apple’s iTunes. Alth...

Brizzly is a web-based Twitter and Facebook client that has been gaining some momentum and buzz over the past couple months.

It has some slick features like being able to view photos and videos in-line in your Twitter stream, threaded DMs, and built-in photo uploading. It also recently added support for Twitter Lists. However, it’s remained in invite-only mode. That changes today though, as B...

According to Marissa Meyer, Google’s vice president of search product and user experience, Google is looking to streamline its search experience. Using a jazz metaphor, Meyer explains that customers aren’t happy with the fact that Google’s search interface is too unpredictable (much like jazz, especially if you aren’t into it) at times.

To rectify this, Google is testing an overhauled interface f...

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer has never been too modest about Microsoft’s sales numbers; in fact, throughout the Vista era he insisted that the news OS is doing great, selling better than any other Microsoft OS in history.

Now, he claims that Windows 7 is selling even better, which we’re inclined to believe based on the fantastic preorder figures. Speaking at Microsoft’s shareholder meeting, Ball...

The Open Web Awards: Social Media Edition, our annual contest highlighting the very best the web has to offer, is entering its final round. The 70,000+ nominees have been narrowed down to just 5 finalists per category, and you have from now until December 15th to pick the winners.

By popular demand, here is the full list of the finalists in each category. You can vote once per category per day. ...

Google stole the tech and media spotlight today as it revealed a mountain of new details about Chrome OS, the company’s new operating system due in late 2010. It is a completely different type of OS (we provide a summary of how) that eliminates the desktop and focuses on getting you on the web quickly and efficiently.

Now that we’ve had some time to digest Chrome OS and get information on all ...