What buzzword most defined the past year in technology? That's the intriguing question in today's Flashies category, as we get close to wrapping up our year-end community choice awards.

And the nominees are ...

Continue reading for our take on each word. As with previous categories, free to offer a write-in candidate in the comments below. Other readers will be able to support your nomination by logging in and clicking the "like" button next your comment. We'll announce all the Flashies winners in a post after the end of the year.

App: This common shorthand for "application" crossed over from the technology world into the mainstream this year, thanks largely to Apple's popular iPhone apps, and its "There's an app for that" advertising campaign. Sure, your IT guy might have used this one in the past, but 2009 was the year when even grandparents started throwing the word around, and knowing what it meant.

Cloud: Nope, it no longer just means those puffy white things floating in the sky. Now, the cloud represents any service on the Internet. In one of our favorite moments of the year, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison went off on the buzzword in a classic rant in which he called cloud computing "nonsense" and noted that "all it is is a computer attached to a network."

Crowdsource: The art of using other people to do your work. Hey, we like that concept. In fact, we "crowdsourced" this list of buzzwords by asking for suggestions on Twitter. Thanks for everyone's input.

E-book: Blame Jeff Bezos and crew for this term, which gained momentum in 2009 as they turned on the marketing engines for the Kindle electronic book reader. Google now returns 90.9 million results for the word "ebook" and 307 million for the term "e-book."

Fail: No wonder this word became so popular in 2009. Perhaps there was no more appropriate way to express the overall meltdown of the economy. In fact, the word was popularized by Seattle's own Ben Huh of Cheezburger Network who operates the wildly popular Fail Blog. Go there to get your daily dose of "epic fails."

Freemium: Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson's book "Free" gave new momentum to this concept, which commonly involves offering a big chunk of material for free, and charging avid users for extras. Examples in the Seattle startup world include Picnik, which offers basic photo-editing tools for free and charges $24.95 a year for advanced features.

Gov 2.0: The offspring of Web 2.0 -- the wildly popular buzzword of the mid-90s. Gov 2.0 came into fashion along with President Barack Obama, whose administration has infused online tools into governing. One of Obama's first moves as president was to call on federal agencies to "harness new technologies" to make their operations more accessible and open to the public. After all, isn't government just one big "crowdsourcing" experiment.

"Tw"anything: This broad category incorporates any word building off the momentum of Twitter. It includes Tweet, Tweep, Twibes, Twuniverse, Tweetgeist, etc. (Thanks to reader Steve Leroux for the suggestion.)

THE FLASHIES: PREVIOUS POLLS

Celebrity Tech Endorsement of 09

Startup Deal of the Year

Coolest Thing We Saw This Year

Tech Triumph of the Year

Craziest Tech Idea of the Year

Biggest Tech Debacle of the Year

Technology Platform of the Year

Hire of the Year

Microsoft Video of the Year