Sometimes it’s just not good enough to have a huge flatscreen tv, sometimes you need the whole house…..

Spotted at lunchtime from the canteen window, Santa was caught on camera. Although the photo evidence is not of the highest quality, the tell-tale signs (white beard, red Santa suit, furry sleeves and presents on the back seat) can all be clearly seen.

The reasons for this pre-Christmas outing are still up for discussion. Perhaps he’s just out doing a dry run for the big night?

Nissan – Cubelist
www.cubelist.com
Rediscover your senses with this latest site from Nissan. Explore them all to unlock the sixth sense; the gift of ubiquity.

Soft Toys aid
www.ikea.com/softtoysaid/
A very cute all singing, all dancing soft toys site for IKEA. For every toy you buy at IKEA, they will donate €1 to Unicef and ‘Save the children.’

Diamond Crystal: Salt 101
www.salt101.com/
A website about salt? Oddly enough this is exactly what this is. An interesting website about salt? Even more odd, that’s exactly what this is. Seriously. Check it out!

Lidu: Follow The Rabbit
www.lidu.fr/followthewhiterabbit/
Sometimes something just has to be experienced. This is derfinitely one of those times. Follow us through the rabbit hole and enter a seriously cool, outragiously creative world of design.

At a recent Pubcon event in Las Vegas, Matt Cutts suggested that 2010 would be the year of speed and this would start to count as a ranking factor. Now even though there are over 200 ranking factors in the algorithm and each is weighted differently, it’s still something to keep in mind. There are a number of things you can do to improve the speed of your site:

1. Quality Hosting and Compressions – Maybe Google will come out with their own hosting package next year. But it will definitely pay to be on a quality hosting package and one that supports GZIP compressions

2. Use Google AJAX Libraries API – You can host your Jscript libraries on Google ensuring your code is directly served from Google’s network.

3. Don’t cripple your site with embedded media and Flash

4. You can replace existing GA code with their new asynchronous tracking.

5. Keep an eye on HTML and CSS – There is often a lot of code bloat in websites. It’s always a good idea to look through your code and look for opportunities to slim it down.

6. Finally you can test the speed of individual pages using Google’s page speed tool.

Hot on the heels of Google Analytics Intelligence, Google has now added another really cool feature Annotations. This is another great addition and makes it easier to share collaborative knowledge around change in traffic patterns. Annotations allow users to add notes against stand out traffic patterns.

If you are a large company that has multiple departments, trying to work out what caused a spike or dip in traffic can be a real pain. Now you can have one standard login and allow teams to add notes against relevant dates. This will allow you to match up any online or offline activity against changes in traffic. Pretty cool !!!

Adding to its list of recent developments, Google is currently trialling out interactive, local search ad formats in the US. The aim is to make search results as relevant and targeted as possible.

To achieve this, Google is looking to add value to search results by integrating more video, pictures, maps, and prices to enhance user search experience. Local maps will help in ‘localization’ of search results while more links within search listings will enable users to reach specific sections of a website instead of the homepage.

This move should help Google keep up with rival Microsoft’s Bing search engine and maintain a majority of the market share.

Okay, it’s not a Christmas ad but it is Christmas and this is an ad!

Happy Friday and a very merry weekend

Playstation 3: The 15 Reasons
www.the15reasons.com/
An interactive, video-based site that brings to life th 15 core reasons why you should own a new slim PS3 console.

Jim Carrey – Official Site
www.jimcarrey.com/
Eplore the psychedelic corners of Jim Carrey’s mind in this absolutely weird and wonderful world. Discover exclusive appearances, behind the scene clips and family photos.

Track My T
www.trackmyt.com/
An ingenious little site here, fully of quirky animation and movie – drop in and explore, it’s well worth a visit

Sony: Walkman Story
www.walkmanstory.pl/
A fantastic offering here from Sony Poland. Although we may not be able to read anything on the site, the illustrations are really cool and fun.

While many consider the Freenet, or Darknet as it is also known, a haven for terrorists and paedophiles it is becoming an indispensable tool for those who live in countries where the internet is heavily censored. Invented as a project thesis by Ian Clarke, an Irish student studying at Edinburgh University in 2000, the Freenet affords total anonymity to users thus rendering IP tracing useless.

It is a common misconception that the search engines that we use such as Google or Bing give you all the results on a keyword search. Many sites and forums that are deemed abhorrent have been banned and removed from engines in the same way ‘Free Tibet’ and other keyword results were removed from Google in order to get their western foot in the door. In the Darknet however, there are no restrictions whatsoever.

So the debate rages on. While we’re all in agreement that ‘How to Make WMDs’ should be removed where do we draw the line? Comments below please, this ain’t the Darknet after all!

Online spending saw 4% growth rate this holiday season compared with last year’s figures.

ComScore today reported on retail e-commerce spending for the first 34 days of the November – December 2009 holiday season. So far, $15.3 billion has been spent on e-commerce, which is a 4% increase on the same time period as last year. The week just gone saw three individual days record over $800 million in spending. ‘Cyber Monday’ saw a total spend of $887 million, which matches the heaviest online spending day on record.

Cyber Monday, which fell on the 7th of December this year, was followed by a number of other hefty spending days online, all of which have attributed to the phenomenal growth seen in e-commerce expenditure this year. Consumer electronics and computer hardware have been noted as the key drivers of this surge, each experiencing growth rates well into the double digits. Growth to date has already exceeded ComScore’s growth forecast of 3%. With another two weeks to go before the festive shopping period ends, this growth rate is set to rise even more.

An analysis of the top 25 online retailers shows an average sales growth rate of 13 percent for the month of November, while smaller retailers have showed a decline of up to 10 percent. This reiterates the point that in an unstable economic environment, it is the larger retailers who maintain competitive advantage in the marketplace, with the ability to drive down costs in a bid to meet the demands of the consumer.

Free shipping, which has always played an important part in incentivising customers to buy online, has evidently played an active role in this growth in online spending. Approximately 50 percent of all sales made online included free shipping. That’s an increase of 11% year on year.