The North American Aerospace Defense Command, otherwise known as NORAD is tracking Santa Claus’s rounds this year, keeping up a tradition that has been going on for 53 years. Mike Sachoff explains:

It’s new feature Tuesday for "Hulu for the Holidays", the JCPenny-sponsored event that has Hulu adding something new each day through the holiday season. On Mondays they add new TV shows. Tuesdays its new site features, and Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays are for new movies.

In an effort to spread some holiday cheer and perhaps some more Google Mobile use, Google is posting a number of holiday video tips for using the Google Mobile service. For instance, here are a couple of mildly amusing videos of Santa using Google Mobile to figure out how to give himself the Heimlich maneuver after he begins to choke, and finding a locksmith when he can’t gain entrance into someone’s home. For some reason, he’s delivering presents in the middle of the day.

Nielsen is sharing some interesting data today regarding online retail web traffic during the holiday season. This data shows that both Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic were up by 10% each when compared to last year.

Google Docs has received a lot of attention lately, most of which was focused on its miniscule market share.  Google would like to address that issue, and as the holiday season approaches, it’s doing so by unveiling some new templates.

And Cyber Monday edges closer still. We’re at about five days now. Of course, we’ve still got Black Friday to deal with and last year shoppers spent around $531 Million online just on that day. Follow Amazon’s example and get ready for that.

Google’s not the only one passing out some tips to get businesses ready for the holidays. They recently offered some tips for utilizing Google Analytics, Google Checkout, and of course, the ever-popular, Google AdWords. Had their deal with Yahoo gone through, you may have been able to incorporate some of these tips with Yahoo’s advertising platform, but it seems that it was not meant to be.

It appears that YouTube has been very busy.

As the holidays approach, are people going to do their shopping online or off? Well, both of course, but Hitwise shares some data that sees online shopping growth at 4.19% over the past four weeks, and that is up from 1.94% growth from the same period last year.

For those of you sitting around this evening either avoiding trick-or-treaters, or just simply looking for some ghostly entertainment to celebrate All Hallow’s Eve, Google has some special content set aside for you.

Not only are they featuring some Halloween Books on the front page of Google Book Search:

In the Halloween spirit, Google has of course supplied us with a "doodle" for the day, but the interesting part of this to me as fan of horror films is that the doodle was designed by Wes Craven.

We’re quickly approaching the end of October. For businesses, that can only mean one thing. The holiday season is nigh! For online businesses, this means that it’s time to kick-start the tactics you should have been using all year. The clock has already begun to tick for getting people to your site and for you to cash in on online shopping for the holidays.

Any interesting report is out today from Chase Paymentech, saying that the online holiday retail sales for 2007 grew by a whopping twenty nine percent.

Depending on your work schedule, this could be your first day back from a holiday vacation.  Here to greet you, then, is a collection of the themed stuff Google did while you were away.

For US-based online businesses, the day after Christmas means getting back to work, but that doesn’t mean the holiday shouldn’t be on one’s mind.

It’s nearly Christmas, and that means it’s time for sales of boots and heavy hats to increase.  Unless, that is, you’re in the Asia Pacific, where new Hitwise data uncovered an interest in Crocs and Oakley sunglasses.

oogle has removed the Video link on its search results pages with one to Google Product Search, relegating the very useful Video link to the “More” menu. The Video link is fourteen items down the More menu, making it a lot of work to reach. Previously, on any Google search, you could hit Video to get results from dozens of popular and unpopular video sites, making it the easiest way to find video on the internet. Now? Not so much.

With the holiday shopping season approaching, people want to buy presents.  An important part of buying things is paying for them, however, and so searches for credit cards are increasing.

Yahoo Search Marketing has been working with one of its travel advertisers, Pleasant Holidays, on an analysis of multi-channel keyword effectiveness.

Thank god for Microsoft