This post is part of Mashable’s Fab Five series with Jalen Rose , which highlights trends in the social media space. Jalen Rose is a former 13-year NBA star and current ESPN basketball analyst but may be best known for being a member of the famous University of Michigan Fab Five . Until a couple of years ago, social media did not exist, and professional athletes had to go through the media to show their personalities and communicate with their fans.

Since we launched Mashable’s 3rd Annual Open Web Awards this past October, you’ve cast over 349,000 votes for your favorite nominees. Over the past few weeks we’ve continued to track the leaders in each category, and now, with just two days left in the nominations period we thought it would be appropriate to take a look at 500 of the current leaders in the competition’s 50 categories.

When it comes to shedding the beta tag, Microsoft is far quicker than Google (some of whose products have been called perpetual betas). Bing UK just lost its beta tag , and gained several interesting features, most importantly Bing Maps (which will replace Multimap , where visitors were redirected until now)

Mashable, in partnership with MOTOBLUR, is proud to announce the 3rd Annual Open Web Awards: Social Media Edition . The 2009 Open Web Awards is our international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology and social media.

Lon S.

Yesterday’s change in Twitter’s Terms of service, in which they explicitly state that every user owns their own tweets is cool, but what does it really mean for the user?

For non-profit organizations and other charities, social media is potentially an incredibly powerful tool to get the word out, connect with constituents, rally support, and even raise money. But, like for any business, social media will only pay dividends for charities if they utilize it properly.