Yes, online visits to retail sites have been up. Yes, retailers are seeing increases in transactions and visitors. What they’re not seeing, though, is more money spent per transaction, which could make things roughly square with last year.

Though there were 2 million more shoppers whipping about online on Cyber Monday, a 22 percent increase over last year and a full 34 percent of the shopping population did their shopping online, Cyber Monday revenue went up a paltry one percent.

Google Reader has added some new data to the Trends department. For those who do not use Google Reader, or pay little attention to the Trends feature, it simply lays your reading habits out graphically so you can see when you are reading feeds the most, what you are reading the most, what you are reading the least, and so on.

Visits to places where one can spend money are down or flat compared to this time last year, according to Hitwise. News, however, is hot.

Multiple Olympic gold medal winner Michael Phelps is one popular guy.

Times of the Internet points out that (like many others these days) Phelps prefers Facebook to MySpace.

Users of Google Trends gained the option to download the comparisons they make through the service to a spreadsheet for further review.

If Internet buzz is any indication of the future—and it’s not, mind you, unless Ron Paul really will get the Republican nomination—David Cook is your next American Idol. According to search metrics and questionable phone measurements, Cook edged out David Archuleta by the slimmest margin in Idol history.

The persistence of housing woes may be seen in the activities of searchers, who perform fewer and fewer queries about home buying.

Google has created a version of its Trends search comparison tool that allows people to look at Google Checkout and what people buy with it.

We recently ran a Reader Poll asking what the hot search marketing trends will be for 2008.

The new year is here and we now have good enough sample of votes cast (78) to share what Online Marketing Blog readers are thinking:

 What will be the big stories in search marketing in 2008?