Much like this year's presidential election, our holidays have become very Web 2.0 oriented. Among online cards and holiday e-mails, Norad continues their annual tradition of tracking Santa Claus's location around the world.

Since 1997, this has included a Web site with updates every 5 minutes showing Santa's progress. For those of you with small children, or anybody interested in the technology, you can view Santa's progress on Norad's site, including an occasional video showing some landmarks he visits.

For everybody else, enjoy the holidays!

-- Frances

How do you do your holiday shopping? As if online shopping wasn't enough (meets most of my needs!), in April, Amazon.com introduced shopping by text message. The concept allows for shopping through text messages on your cell phone, reviewing the options Amazon replies with, and confirming a purchase.

Ever the innovators, Amazon has now launched an experimental iPhone and iPod Touch application that allows you to take a photo of an item and send it to Amazon.com, which will try to match it to an available product. When you retrieve the results, you can purchase the items immediately or store them for later in your Amazon.com account.

For those of you with an iPhone that may be interested, it's available for free at the iPhone Applications Store. Use with caution, of course... it is shopping, no matter how easy it seems.

For anybody that wants to celebrate the holiday season without shopping, there's a Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar that will feature a new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope each day as we approach Christmas. The Hubble photos are impressive (some animated!) and include explanations as to what was photographed.

-- Frances