Global Language Monitor is a Texas based company that measures the most commonly used words in the English language every year.  It turns out that the number one most used word of 2009 was “Twitter.” Following Twitter was the words “Barack Obama” and “H1N1″ at second and third place, respectively.  Other words that were included in the top 10 list was stimulus, vampire, 2.0, deficit, Hadron, healthcare, and transparency.  The full press release of the list is available after the jump.

Zorap is an online video chatting company that raised $1.35 million in funding from private investors. Zorap has chat rooms where up to 50 friends can have a video-conference. Zorap’s interface will support dragging and dropping media such as YouTube videos and MP3 files. One of the investors lives in Seattle and the other one lives in California. The company was founded by Barry Spencer.

Motorola and Verizon spent about $100 million in marketing costs for the Verizon Droid mobile device. The ad campaign behind the Droid phone paid off because it is nearing 800,000 in total sales according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Sue. This is near the goal that the company had to push 1 million units by the fourth quarter of 2009.

“According to our survey, some higher-traffic Verizon stores in major cities may be selling over 100-200 Droid units per week since the launch,” stated Sue in a note to clients. “The bulk of Motorola’s smartphones this quarter will be at Verizon.”

AT&T tried to halt Verizon’s marketing campaign by filing a temporary restraining order against the “there’s a map for that” advertisements. The judge ruled against the restraining order. AT&T quickly responded by hiring Luke Wilson and launching an ad campaign called “Can Your Phone and Your Network Do That?”

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) made a deal with Seth MacFarlane to have Family Guy promote new operating system Windows 7. But at the last minute Microsoft decided to pull the deal because they did not agree on the politically incorrect content often displayed on Family Guy. Regardless Microsoft decided to post the Family Guy videos on YouTube anyway. After the jump are the clips that never aired on TV but found its way on the Internet.

Michael Arrington was about two weeks away from announcing the CrunchPad, but there was a major problem with the management of the project. The CrunchPad prototype worked very well and worked for hours without crashing. Chandra Rathakrishnan, the CEO of the partner company working with Michael Arrington wrote him an e-mail saying that Arrington himself will no longer be part of the project due to a shareholder disagreement.

The shareholders decided to sell the CrunchPad through Fusion Garage without his involvement. Below is the e-mail that shareholders forwarded over to Rathakrishnan:
“We still acknowledge that Arrington and TechCrunch bring some value to your business endeavor…If he agrees to our terms, we would have Arrington assume the role of visionary/evangelist/marketing head and Fusion Garage would acquire the rights to use the Crunchpad brand and name. Personally, I don’t think the name is all that important but you seem to be somewhat attached to the name.” Arrington plans to file a lawsuit against Fusion Garage along with Rathakrishnan as a result of the failed project.

Intel and a retail partner (who I believe is Best Buy given that their CMO praised the device) helped facilitate the CrunchPad project this far. I would have loved to see the project come into fruition too because at the $300 price point that was set, the CrunchPad would have been an amazing netbook competitor.

Cleveland Indians center fielder Grady Sizemore is working with Major League Baseball investigators to halt images of him spreading across the Internet. Supposedly the e-mail account of Sizemore’s girlfriend Playboy Playmate Brittany Binger was hacked into and the photos were stolen. One of the photos included Sizemore nude and smiling in a bathroom mirror while he held up a teacup.

“We fully support Grady as he deals with this personal matter,” stated the Cleveland Indians in response to the incident. “The posted photos were stolen from his girlfriend’s e-mail account and a legal investigation is under way.” Sizemore is the most popular player on the Cleveland Indians roster. Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton posted the private photos on his blog.

The National Retail Federation conducted a survey that predicts that about 96.5 million Americans will be shopping online today. This is up from 85 million last year. Over the past weekend, millions of people went shopping on websites generating $595 million in just online total sales.

“Shoppers proved this weekend that they were willing to open their wallets for a bargain, heading out to take advantage of great deals on less expensive items like toys, small appliances, and winter clothes,” stated NRF President and CEO Tracy Mullin in a press release. “While retailers are encouraged by the number of Americans who shopped over Black Friday weekend, they know they have their work cut out for them to keep people coming back through Christmas.”

If you went shopping online today, let us know what you bought in the comments.

News feed stream reader company TweetDeck has unleashed a new version dubbed 0.32.0 of their desktop application that has four new features. The four new features are geolocation support with a map, LinkedIn stream, retweet Twitter style and list support.

LinkedIn joins Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook in having status support from TweetDeck. Now TweetDeck has support for the four major social networks in the U.S. I would not be surprised if Orkut, Bebo, and Hi5 get added in the near future too.

Originally when TweetDeck had a retweet function, it would add “RT” before retweeting what another user was saying. Since Twitter integrated retweets into their own service, it shows an icon instead of the “RT.” The icon is of one arrow pointing up and another arrow pointing down. TweetDeck added the option to retweet with that Twitter style or continue using the “RT.”

Many Twitter users add a geolocation of their tweet. This means that if they are tweeting on a mobile device that is sending out the user’s longitude and latitude, their readers will be able to know where that person is. To pull up a map of geolocated tweets, there is a pin icon that appears next to the tweet message.

Lastly TweetDeck entered support for Twitter lists. TweetDeck already had support for group columns and that option will remain. But going forward, there will be an option to create a Twitter List out of a group column that you set up.