Cyber Monday, the big online shopping day the first Monday after Thanksgiving, has been a very accurate bellwether as to how strong the holiday shopping season is going to be. Over the last three years, the increase in sales over previous years’ Cyber Mondays has invariable been within two percentage points of the increase over the entire previous holiday season.

Last year, Cyber Monday was 21% bigger than the year before, with a total holiday online increase of 19%. The previous years had increases of 25% in 2005 and 26% in 2006, so this did represent a slight slowdown in online holiday shopping growth.
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I’m visiting some close friends in Boulder, Colorado right now and one of them has turned me on to a web site that lets guys get great, unique hand-crafted gifts for their girlfriends.

Etsy.com provides a way for craftspeople across the country to get their wares out to a wider audience, which means anything bought on Etsy helps support actual people rather than some larger conglomerate that imports cheap items from overseas and marks them up to maximize profit. So not only do you get to find completely unique hand-made items, but you’re doing some good as well in supporting small-time artists and craftspeople.
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I like Live Search Cashback. I’ve used it a couple of times and have gotten some very good deals. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it has not led me to utilize Live Search any more than usual. But I’m more than happy to use the service to save money.

For Black Friday, Microsoft had a good number of sweet deals available for shoppers. Unfortunately, Live Search Cashback has been down for large portions of the day. Uh oh.
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As of late, many of the biggest stories breaking in the world are being covered by social media users in real time using platforms like Twitter. The recent Chinese earthquake broke on Twitter about a half hour before the major mainstream news channels alerted us to this.

The recent terror attacks in Mumbai followed this model, with eyewitnesses reporting on the happenings before any news organizations were able to get any solid information. However, in situations like these, are there lines that social media users should not cross?
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An interesting little tidbit on both CrunchGear and BoingBoing today: a shill for Motorola has been cruising gadget message boards, blatantly talking up Motorola’s touch-screen Krave, making the company look like total tools to everyone involved.

There are good ways to utilize social media, and bad ways. Getting online and identifying yourself as an employee of a company whose product you’re shilling for (even going so far as to post a link) screams out amateur hour and will provide ten times more bad press on tech blogs than any positive result you get from doing it.
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Legendary basketball big man Shaquille O’Neal, currently plying his trade for the Phoenix Suns, has joined Twitter. And unlike other star turns on Twitter (such as Britney Spears), this actually feels like the Big Aristotle in action, in spite of one pro-Kobe Tweet.

Most impressive is that Shaq has already amassed 12,500 followers after only a week on Twitter, with Tweets like, “I called my main man figs son bcuz da xcellence of a gift lies n its approiateness ratha than its value,” how could you not want to follow Shaq?
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USWeb would like to welcome our newest team member, Dale Duyan.  Dale will be joining our sales team to help prospects learn about all USWeb services and products.  Dale will be working out of Las Vegas, Nevada with local clients, as well as select clients across the country.

I had a chance to test out the new BlackBerry Storm for a good period of time today. Mostly, I paid attention to the clickable screen, which is certainly what puts the new touch-screen BlackBerry in a different league from any other smartphone.

It really does click, but the surface itself isn’t tactile when your finger are running across it. It is very helpful that it lights up brightly when you’re hovering over the right location, and having the touchpad lengthwise on the screen definitely comes in helpful.
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The Shiba Inu puppy cam on Ustream.tv was a phenomenon when I wrote about it 15 days ago. At 1500 viewers at a time and 800,000 total hits, it was a huge hit.

Now, the puppies are getting bigger and the viewership has increased tenfold. With about 15,000 viewers at a time and a whopping 4 million total hits, it’s no surprise that Ustream.tv is hooking up the soon-to-be new owners of the puppies with cameras so viewers can keep up on the dogs.
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More on Google’s new SearchWiki soon… I want to test it out for awhile and see how it works rather than repeat what others are saying about. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has what I would call the authoritative article about it that I’ve ready today.

I other Google news, they have shut down their virtual worlds site, Lively. Yes, the Second Life-like platform started strong and then flatlined to only a few thousand daily unique hits after an initial surge of 150,000 per day.
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