California’s gubernatorial race is heating up, especially when it comes to televised commercials.

California’s gubernatorial race is heating up, especially when it comes to televised commercials. Republican candidate Meg Whitman’s campaign recently released a spot that calls Democratic nominee Jerry Brown’s political career a failure. At one point, the ad features a photo of Jerry Brown on what appears to be the FAIL Blog (roughly 50 seconds into the clip embedded below) with “FAIL” stamped over his face.

Viral phenom Bros Icing Bros might be dead in the sense that there’s tumbleweeds drifting on its homepage, but the meme lives on. College Humor recently put together this cleverly cut video in which famous “reveal” scenes in movies are transformed into epic icings — think The Shining, The Fifth Element and Shawshank Redemption . My personal favorite icing in the vid is the one featuring Back to the Future Part II (my favorite Back to the Future film was III, though).

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

Mashable’s Spark of Genius series highlights a unique feature of startups.

Yahoo has thrown its hat into the ring when it comes to offering an authoritative source on all things digital publishing, launching “The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World.” To an extent, the guide is an alternative to the AP Stylebook, which has long-defined the grammar, punctuation and style of editors –- both online and off. In that area, some of Yahoo’s guidelines might be seen as more progressive, perhaps most notably with “email” losing the hyphen (AP Stylebook still has it as “e-mail” although it recently changed “Web site” to “website” –- a much applauded move ) and “smartphone” as one word (the AP has it as two). Beyond the style issues, however, Yahoo’s guide offers lots of practical advice for writing for the web, with articles about issues like how to appeal to an online audience, making your site accessible to those with disabilities, search engine optimization, creating content for mobile devices and what makes a strong headline

Nokia has taken Apple to task for comments made by Steve Jobs about how users experiencing reception problems on their new iPhone 4 devices should “ avoid holding it that way ” (“that way” meaning a grip that blocks the antenna).