Congratulations to the all of the Blogger's choice winners in the Open Web Awards.  With over 100 blogger's voting to make this possible, go ahead and strutt your stuff by posting up the Open Web Awards badge on your site.

While the voting for blogger's is done, there is still the people choice award up for grabs.  So go here people and vote

Remember: voting for the People’s Choice Open Web Awards ends this Sunday night at 11:59 pm PST, with a winners announcement on Tuesday.

I know you aren't really working at your desk anyway; you're checking the news, Facebook and email. You are thinking about the party you just had/will have and looking at someone else's/your own holiday wish list. Surf with a purpose by voting in the FINAL voting round of the Open Web Awards!

According to Pete Cashmore, there were "more than 50,000 nominations and in excess of 80,000 verified votes". You can find both familiar and unfamiliar names in the list below which makes this vote so exciting. While none of the companies are associated with Rick Astley or Deborah "Debbie" Gibson, you can still make a dark horse count this year, so VOTE!

You will be able to vote up until 11:59pm PST on Sunday, December 14th - once per day

Full List of Finalists - Open Web Awards follows:

There are a lot of news reader websites and applications out on the web these days. Google Reader and a slew of others try to keep up with sites you enjoy and email or notify you when something you care about happens. One interesting approach is Hermosa Beach-based Streamy which I had an opportunity to try during their beta.

Streamy's notion of surfing is a group affair and they focus on social networking as a core aspect of the site. Drop your favorite link into a Streamy IM window and chat about the sites you care about.

Beyond this, Streamy has a very slick, clean interface which makes good use of AJAX, is intuitive, and any widget user will feel right at home dragging boxes of content around their home page.

I echo the concerns some other pre-reviews have raised about Streamy: mainly that they are introducing established features that you can find elsewhere. I also noticed they have some issues with Safari, although both IE and Chrome behaved well. Finally, time will tell once they open their doors if they can break out of the pack.

For beta invites feel free to contact myself alex [at] techzulu [dot] com or any other of the TZ crew members

I believe it’s easier for programmers to become journalists than it is for journalists to become programmers, but both sides need to gain an appreciation for the other in order for this sort of thing to happen more often. Fortunately, some news organizations are starting to hire developers with this in mind, and some geeks are realizing journalism is a great, (mostly) pure field that lets you improve the world through information.

So it is with the idea of ‘improving the world through information’ that we set out to tackle the cool startups, the upcoming tech trends and ideas shaping our community, and those tech ideas that are integral to sustaining the planet, to the best "buys" at Circuit City. And we don’t have to do that with a snarky message or taking a red marker to an image. As a great driver of industry, technology improves people’s lives – let’s focus on the positive and find ways to help the world through content and connectedness.