Tag: OPENWEBAWARDS

The first annual Open Web Awards voting season has officially drawn to a close. Yesterday we presented the Judge's Choice winners. But we've long had a sinking suspicion that our readers are smarter than us, so we've been kind of curious to see what the results would be. And now we're ready to share them with you. While we wouldn't be surprised to discover there may have been some ballot box ...

While you've been busy casting votes for your favorite online communities in the Open Web Awards, the folks behind the scenes at Download Squad, Mashable, and 29 other participating blogs have been casting votes as well. Tomorrow we'll have the complete list of of winners based on your votes. But it turns out it's a lot easier to tally up a few dozen votes than tens of thousands, so today we ...

Some things you like to do alone, like reading a good book, or watching your DVD collection of Dawson's Creek. But some things are intrinsically better if you've got more people around, like going to a football game, or at least watching one at home with a few buddies and a few beers. So it's no surprise that web services have popped up that let you share your love of sports, photography, or silly ...

The internet is kind of like a high school cafeteria. There's enough room for everyone to find a table to sit at. If you put a few hundred people together, odds are you're going to find that some people have similar interests. And so the nerds sit at one table, the jocks at another, and the stoners hang out behind the bleachers in the gym. The web takes this phenomenon and magnifies it by a ...

For the last few days we've been asking you to vote on your favorite social networking sites. We've looked at the some of the coolest sites in social news, shopping, search, video, and photo sharing. Each provides a new way to interact with the world through your web browser. That's great if you're on a full sized computer, but when it comes to the mobile web, some sites are better than others. ...

Cute shoes. Where did you get them? What do you mean you don't know where the store is? Oh, you got them from an online store. OK, well who told you about the web site? What do you mean, you don't know? Oh, really. You found another web site where users get to submit and vote on product deals and you just followed the link. So what you're saying is that a committee of people you've never met ...

Sometimes we have a hard time remembering how we used to find out about new music before the internet. It's so easy these days to find new music online. Some web services let you create a profile with all of your favorite bands and then browse other users' profiles to find people with similar tastes. Others let you enter a band name in order to listen to streaming music from artists with a similar ...

What are you doing tonight? No seriously, we were thinking we'd come over, open up a bottle of merlot, maybe order some pizza? Oh right, you're way too busy for that, because you've got such a full social calendar. Right, guess we'll just stay home and wash our hair. But first, tell us, what's your secret? How do you always seem to know about the latest goings on in your neck of the woods? What's ...

What's the first thing you look at when you open your web browser every day? If you're not particularly creative, it might be a search engine, or whatever web site your computer manufacturer threw in as your Internet Explorer/Firefox home page. But we're betting most Download Squad readers like to get completely overloaded with information the moment they go online. We're talking personalized ...

Dogs riding skateboards, guys with ridiculously low voices singing ridiculous songs, and cats playing the piano. You've seen them, you love them, you hate them. Either way, they're a fact of life. We're fairly certain that a day doesn't go by that you don't get an email from a friend, coworker, or relative asking you to check out some cute or disgusting video or other. When it comes to online ...

Gather round youngsters while we tell you a tale. Once upon a time we all had to use these clunky old cameras that contained something called film. While it might sound like some sort of mucus membrane that you had to wipe off your fingers when you were done taking a picture, it was actually sort of like a flash card, but you had to drop it off at a nearby drug store and wait for a day or two ...

Until recently search was a closed book. Done deal. Google won, everyone else lost. Then a few brave (or fool-hardy) pioneers decided they'd had enough of the link farming, the Google bombing, and all the manipulation which comes with Google's page-rank. They decided they could do it better. Soon a host of new sites were popping up like dandelions in spring, each lobbying for your attention and ...

Once a placeholder name used in textbooks to illustrate a fictional product, Widgets now have their own awards. Those are the times in which we live. It's not our fault, we didn't usurp the term widget to describe snippets of code that allow your mom to add the latest web thing-a-ma-bob to her blog, but there you have it. Widgets are a part of the lexicon. Regardless of this sad, made up word ...

As we've mentioned previously, Download Squad is participating in the Open Web Awards. It's kinda like the Oscars, except you pick, not that stuffy academy. Oh, and it has nothing to do with movies. Well, that and there won't be any ridiculously long acceptance speeches where people forget to thank their dad, but remember to thank their mom. But, aside from those minor details, it's exactly like ...