Fast and Furious Actor Paul Walker Dead at 40

Paul Walker, an actor best known for his role as a fast-driving cop opposite bad-guy-gone-good Vin Diesel in the Fast and Furious movie series died on Saturday in a car crash in Santa Cruz, California, according to multiple sources. Walker was 40 years old.

News of the fatal crash spread first online after celebrity news site TMZ broke the story. Initially, most other news outlets and Twitter accounts picked it up as a report.

Has it been confirmed by other news sources? RT @LanceUlanoff: Paul Walker dies in crash: report http://t.co/rIPIlVNfo3 #RIP

— Jodi Echakowitz (@JodiEchakowitz) December 1, 2013 Read more...

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25 Top Mashable Resources of the Week

It has been a crazy week in the tech world, so if you've been in a turkey-induced coma most of the week and missed some Mashable news, don't worry—we've got you covered

As always, we've rounded up the top 25 digital media resources of the last week, including plenty of Thanksgiving tips and Cyber Monday deals to ensure you get everything on your list. Scroll to the end for the top news of the week

Editor's Picks

A YouTube Legend Battles for His Basketball Future

Kiwi Gardner has become a star on YouTube, but does that mean he can make it in the NBA?

10 People Who Only Show Up During the Holidays

The holidays bring out some strange personalities. Look through this list and see if you recognize anyone. Read more...

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Beyond E-Books: HarperCollins Looks For the Next Big Thing

As competitors in the e-book subscription market, Scribd and Oyster like to emphasize their differences. Yet the two share a common talking point: They both drop the name HarperCollins.

The New York-based publishing house, whose roots date back to 1817, was the only one of the Big Five publishers to offer some of its backlist titles — and perhaps more importantly, some of its prestige — to these startups at launch, helping to kickstart the fledging Netflix-like e-book subscription market

"They intuitively got what we were doing right from the first meeting," Trip Adler, Scribd's CEO and cofounder, told Mashable in a recent interview about his interactions with HarperCollins. "They operate the most like a technology company in terms of their willingness to try new things." Read more...

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Why Traffic Is Digital Marketing's Foundational Metric

If you take the retail marketing adage "location, location, location," and translate it to digital, the result would be visit rate, or traffic. In the physical world, it's possible to pay premium rent to get your product in front of lots of people, but on the web, garnering traffic is a bit more nuanced. The medium requires strategies that are focused on targeted audiences rather than the general public, not because products are narrow, but because methods of measuring efficacy enable marketers to see more success this way.

Visit rate is likely the oldest metric on the Internet, and continues to be highly relevant for every kind of businesses. The most widely used statistic is visits per day, although unique visitors per day is usually seen as more actionable. This rate is often compared month-to-month or year-over-year and is often paired with frequency of visits, return visits or daily return visits Read more...

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Cyber Monday Deals You Can't Miss

Black Friday hadn't even ended before some retailers started teasing their deals for Cyber Monday.

Amazon announced plans to start its Cyber Monday deals at midnight on Sunday and run promotions throughout the week. Walmart did one better and started its "Cyber Week" sales on Saturday.

See also: 14 Tips to Avoid Cyber Monday Scams

The term "Cyber Monday" was first coined in 2005 and it has since turned into the single biggest shopping day of the year for online retailers. Consumers spent nearly $1.5 billion online on Cyber Monday last year, the third year in a row that sales topped the $1 billion mark, according to data from comScore Read more...

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Tell A Compelling Story Through Diptychs For Our Photo Challenge

In photography, a diptych is a pair of photographs placed side by side to form one single artistic statement or comparison. The images can be identical or similar in composition, they can show different angles of the same scene, or they can demonstrate polar opposites such as morning and night, old and new, or before and after

Diptychs are great because they can deliver twice the storytelling impact of a single image. We want you to try this technique for this week's round of our Mashable Photo Challenge

See also: 6 Apps for Making Instagram Borders and Shapes

You can use Photoshop on your computer or any collage app on your smartphone to combine your images. Feel free to check out this Flickr group for some diptych inspiration. Read more...

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12 Vines That Sum Up Black Friday

Ah, Black Friday. The shop-til-you-sometimes-literally-drop holiday has become a spectacle leading up to campers posting up in line several days before Friday. In fact, this year, shoppers were in line around the U.S. as early as Wednesday.

See also: 12 Black Friday Hall-of-Famers

In honor of the madness, we collected parodies and real shoppers captured on Vine. Check out the list below and add links to your favorites in the comments.

1. Black Friday Shopping

2. Really ... #toosoon #blackfriday

3. People on Black Friday Be Like

4. Black Friday at Express!! :)

Read more...

5. Black Friday Gonna Be Like ... (Inspired By Gary Rojas)

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Smart Night Light Takes Fear Out of Bedtime

Product name: Boon Glo

Price: $84.99

Who would like this?: Kids of all ages

Children can be surprisingly hard to buy for at Christmas. Once you take into account what Santa Claus is planning to drop down the chimney, you may not find yourself with many options

We think we've found the ideal gift for kids of all ages — the Boon Glo night light. It's perfect for younger children struggling to overcome their fear of the dark, or for older kids who want to extend "lights out" time

We can all remember the comforting power of a night light. The Boon Glo takes this concept and adds some cool tech to make for some innovative illumination. While we can't promise getting them into bed will be any easier, we're sure all kids will be excited to turn on the Glo for an evening Read more...

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Smartphone-Controlled Paper Airplane Soars on Kickstarter

Designing the perfect paper airplane — the one that flies the farthest and the fastest — is about to get easier.

Power Up 3.0, built by designer Shai Goitein, promises to give your basic paper model an upgrade, using a small attachable propeller and rudder for a little more speed and steering control

See also: How Kickstarter Users Evolved the Famous Ostrich Pillow

The most impressive part of this flight enthusiast's design is the Bluetooth connectivity, which allows you to control your paper airplane via your smartphone with an accompanying app. Tilting your phone to the left or right allows you to turn your airplane as it flies a whopping 60 yards. The app also includes a compass, controls for thrust and readouts for battery life and range Read more...

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25 Spinning Long Exposure Photos to Leave You Breathless

Adventurous photographers on Instagram often capture gorgeous circular streaks of golden light — otherwise known as steel wool spinning.

The process behind these shimmering photographs requires the photographer to set fire to a tuft of steel wool tucked inside a wire whisk attached to a long, thick wire. If you swing the flaming wool in circles before a camera set for long exposure photography, the resulting images show dazzling bursts of light in otherwise darkened settings

See also: 15 Gorgeous Double-Exposed Instagram Photos

It's a risky but exciting way to create offbeat images that will grab your followers' attention. Treat your eyes to 25 fiery steel wool long exposure photos on Instagram. Read more...

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Social Media Drove Just 1% of Black Friday Online Sales

Black Friday online sales hit another record this year, according to the latest data from IBM, but social media played a relatively small role — at least when measured directly

IBM found that just about 1% of purchases and traffic on ecommerce websites for Black Friday and the week as a whole were directly generated by social media sites. To put that another way, only 1% of orders on shopping sites came from people who visited a social network immediately before. That number, which is based on IBM tracking transactions across 800 U.S. retail websites, didn't improve much from the previous year Read more...

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10 Christmas Movies Made Less Magical by Adulthood

A lot of things about Christmas change as you move from childhood into an adult.

The endless expanse of days between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve seems to shrink, presents become a responsibility instead of magically appearing under your tree, and the Christmas movies you've loved forever just don't feel the same.

See also: 14 Stunning Photographs That Bridge Past and Present

You can still keep the same holiday movie lineup, but as the years pass you'll start questioning things that you missed when you and your siblings were still wearing matching sweaters.

Image: Warner Brothers Read more...

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Newly Discovered Dinosaur Species Ran the Show Before T. Rex

It might not have had a starring role in any movies or rock bands named after it, but scientists now believe there was a species of mega-predator that roamed Earth at the top of the food chain for millions of years before Tyrannosaurus.

It's called Siats meekerorum, and a team of researchers led by Lindsay Zanno, a North Carolina State University paleontologist, and Peter Makovicky, from Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, discovered the dinosaur's partial skeleton in Utah in 2008. They announced their findings last week, calling it the third largest carnivore ever discovered in North America. Read more...

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Must Reads: The Future of a YouTube Legend, Internet-Free Camps and More

During the week, we consume words in snackable, tweetable bites. But on the weekends, we have the time to take a dive into the murkier, lengthier depths of the Internet and expand our attention spans beyond 140 characters. We can brew a cup of coffee and lie back with our iPads, laptops, smartphones and Kindles.

Since you're bound to miss a few things during the daily grind, we present to you, in our weekly installation of Mashable Must Reads, a curated list of can't-miss stories to read and reflect on. (You can find last week's must reads here.) Read more...

A YouTube Legend Battles for his Basketball Future

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11 Beard Facts to Make You Proud of Your Movember Facial Hair

November is drawing to a close, which means your weeks of shaving negligence have turned your wispy mustache into a full-blown, manly beard worthy of cavemen

We're sure you've grown to love your unkempt facial hair, and will miss it dearly when it's gone. Your chin will be much colder

See also: 10 Totally True Mustache Facts to Motivate You During Movember

So before you butcher your beard, revel in these 11 "facts" from Doghouse Diaries about the power of facial hair

Until next year, men (and women) of Movember!

Comic illustration courtesy of Doghouse Diaries. Published with permission; all rights reserved. Read more...

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The 6 Best Instagram Overlay Apps

A picture is worth a thousand words — until you add text, that is.

Instagram overlays add another layer to your already-fabulous pictures. They allow for endless possibilities, and today’s versatile and intuitive overlay apps can have you sharing masterpieces in 15 seconds flat.

See also: 8 Signs You've Overfiltered Your Instagram Photos

The apps we’ve gathered here focus on letting you insert well-designed text and pictures onto your pics. If you’re more interested in creating fanciful borders, shapes and collages, check out our related article.

Don’t forget to allow the apps access to your phone’s pictures via the privacy settings. Read more...

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