Like us, you've probably just come out of a tryptophan-inspired coma on a relative's couch and are jonesing for some tech news. Unfortunately, the newsmakers are likely in the same position. While we cull the tubes for Internet-related happenings, check out this panoply of sites, apps, curiosities, trends and more. Happy Thanksgiving! Sponsor "Somewhat" Frank Gruber Is Thankful For His New Web Project Our good friend Frank Gruber has been working on Thankfulfor.com , a social gratitude journal. Gruber writes that he and partner Jen Consalvo wanted to create "a forum for expressing gratitude routinely as a foundation for happiness and well-being." Frank and Jen with Sir Richard Branson earlier this year. "People come to the site and post what they are thankful for to their personal journal of thanks. People can also choose to send each Thankfulfor post to their social network on Twitter (each post starts with the #thankfulfor hashtag) extending the good vibes far and wide." During the holiday season, Gruber's hosting a Gratitude Challenge for the remainder of the holiday season to encourage users around the world to spread the love. A great idea from a couple of great people! Helping the Hungry Through YouTube Videos Most of the Americans reading this are probably ridiculously stuffed with turkey and the associated edibles, but the good folks at YouTube recognized our annual gluttony as a great opportunity to help the less fortunate. Using their own homepage and blog as a platform, the site asked users, a.k.a. Video Volunteers , to create videos to promote the hunger-related nonprofit of their choice. along with the organization Feeding America and special curator David Arquette, YouTube has selected three submissions on the site. Here's one we liked: Next week, curator Morgan Freeman will kick off another round of submissions, this time focusing on human rights. Search Traffic Gets Seasonal, Economy Remains Slow Hitwise research director Heather Dougherty writes that year after year, Thanksgiving is the peak day for Internet visits to major retail websites, outstripping Black Friday, the day after Christmas, and other traditional big shopping days. Typically, for search engines, Thanksgiving also marks a peak in user searches for major retailers. However, yearly trends show significant drops in traffic and searches between 2007 and 2008. And, Doughtery writes, "The daily visits to the Retail 500 are down compared to last year leading up to the big holiday weekend." Check out the purple line on this graph; it represents search traffic for major retail brands leading up to the holiday, and it's measurably lower than in previous years: Also, the orange line on this graph shows site traffic stats for the same group of retailers. It, too, shows a decline from traffic in previous years. Take heart, online retailers! Stats for traffic coming from email marketing are actually quite robust. Are email marketers with cleverly presented bargains succeeding in these times of woe and want? This seems to be the case. SocialVibe's Facebook App Aims to Feed Folks in Need SocialVibe is all about helping brands and users create positive social change. In a typical SocialVibe setup, a brand "sponsors" users, who take small actions and engagements to raise money for the charity of their choice. The new SocialVibe Facebook app involves partnerships with multiple brands and allows users to help feed the hungry through the UN World Food Programme. Users create virtual Thanksgiving tables, choose one of three decor themes, pick food items to bring, and and invite friends. By engaging in simple, free brand interactions, users are able to furnish their and their friends' tables with turkeys, mashed potatoes, and all the traditional dishes - and best of all, each food item in the app equates to a specific number of meals the UN World Food Programme will be able to provide to hungry families and individuals. That wraps up this year's Thanksgiving around the web. What new sites, apps, or campaigns did you notice and love this year? Tell us all about them in the comments! Discuss

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The ReadWriteWeb Thanksgiving Day Parade

Last night we wrote about Forrester's prediction that online holiday retail sales will grow 8% this year to $44.7 billion. comScore had similar numbers about the growth of online retail - toy web sites grew 9% in October, as did the retail apparel segment. Online personal finance service Mint.com has joined the festive statistics parade, with data analyzing some of the U.S.'s leading retailers. Mint analyzed spending data and compared it to one year ago. The data is for top performers in the third quarter this year, based on "average monthly spend per user versus recession lows." Sponsor Interestingly, Mint's data says that Q4 sales will not be as good as last year - which is the opposite of what Forrester predicts. However Mint does say that consumer electronics and clothing are set to rise in Q4. Check out the charts below and compare them to Forrester and comScore's data . The highlights, via Mint.com: Aeropostale - the clothing retailer is up 10% year-over-year, having grown consistently quarter over quarter. Best Buy - the electronics retailer is up 1% Q3 year-over-year, hit a recession low of -7%. Fry's - while competitor Best Buy's sales exceed where they were at this point last year, Fry's remains down -7% year-over-year (though it's up from a -16% recession low). J.Crew - the clothing retailer's lowest point was -3%, but it has since entirely corrected and even improved sales 4% year-over-year. Sears - the department store's sales are up 8% over this time last year, having dipped to -10%. Target - after an initial drop to -8% in Q109, Target has halved that loss and is currently down only -4% year-over-year. See also: Online Retail Thriving: 8% Growth Expected This Holiday Season Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: E-commerce Discuss

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Mint Data Shows Online Retail Rebounding

Over the past decade, Amazon.com and eBay have continued to dominate the online retail market in the United States. However, there have been signs that more social and distributed forms of online shopping are gaining traction. eBay, in particular, is beginning to lose ground . In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. Advances in recommendations technology, together with the emergence of social media and mobile commerce, have combined to change the way e-commerce is transacted. Sponsor This is the third in a ReadWriteWeb series looking back at some of the key trends of the past 10 years. We previously covered the online music industry and the democratization of news media . Recommendations Technology Advances Over the past decade the online retail industry has seen great strides in the use of recommendations technology . Amazon has consistently led the field in this, with its sophisticated blend of personalized, social and item recommendations. Many of the retail recommendations in use today rely on implicit user data . These systems typically track user data, which is then analyzed with a set of usually proprietary algorithms. The end result: recommendations for users. Earlier this year we looked into Baynote's recommendation system : "Baynote observes real-time user behavior on a site and looks for implicit, emergent patterns. It uses collective intelligence and an affinity engine to analyze the data. Common behaviors which it tracks include page refers, queries, mouse movement, time spent on a page, peer behavior." Other similar recommendation technologies we've profiled include MyBuys , ATG and richrelevance . Social Media Takes Retail to Blogs, Social Networks As with nearly every other industry, shopping sites have increasingly used social media to promote their wares. According to Shop.org's recent eHoliday Study , 47.1% of retailers surveyed will be increasing their use of social media this holiday season. Specifically, more than half of retailers have "added or improved their Facebook page (60.3%) and Twitter pages (58.7%)" this year. Nearly two-thirds (65.6%) have "added or enhanced blogs and RSS feeds" over the same time period. One result of this has been a big increase in implicit social recommendations data across social networks and blogs. Another trend with ecommerce sites is distributed sales. Anyone can embed an Amazon store into their blog or social network these days. As Kurt Collins of social commerce vendor Cartfly told us in December , this won't replace "end destination e-commerce" - but it will "augment sales tremendously" at the edge of the network. Mobile Commerce Arrives, Albeit Slowly... The growth of mobile phones has been a big trend this decade. However, as Sarah Perez wrote in September, mobile commerce in the U.S. market has struggled for momentum. According to data from eMarketer , more than 70 million U.S. mobile phone users will access the internet from their devices this year. Despite this, the m-commerce market remains immature. In an April 2009 survey by RIS News , privacy and security concerns are still at the forefront of both shoppers' and retailers' minds. There is some promise that mobile commerce will finally gain traction in the coming decade. Mobile payments firm Billing Revolution found that on-the-go consumers are happy to purchase small ticket items like pizza and movie tickets, for example. One market that has shown strong signs of mobile commerce growth is Japan, according to Morgan Stanley . See also our analysis of mobile payments . Conclusion New recommendations technologies make it easier every year for consumers to find what they want, social media has driven a lot of retail activity to small websites and social networks, and mobile commerce has slowly but surely gained a foothold in e-commerce. These are just some of the trends in e-commerce over the past 10 years. While Amazon.com and eBay continue to be the giants of online retail, the Social Web and advances in web technology have both had a big impact this decade. See also: Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media Discuss

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Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: E-commerce

Writing a book will never be easy, but FastPencil' s mission is to make things easier for authors by bringing this process online and to collaborate with others. FastPencil takes writers from idea to published book. The service offers features for collaboration, editing and design, as well as professional consulting services for authors. One cool feature of FastPencil is that it can import blog posts and turn them into books and e-books that bloggers can then sell through all the major book distribution channels. Sponsor Features The areas where FastPencil exceeds are online editing, collaboration and distribution. Fast Pencil offers a surprisingly comprehensive online editing suite. While this editor isn't quite as fully-featured as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or Apple's Pages - there is no feature to create headlines or tables of content, for example - it's more than enough to power the service's online collaboration tools. In it's latest update, which launched earlier this week, FastPencil introduced a number of interesting new features. These include new templates, new roles for collaborators (co-authors, project managers) and forums for prospective authors to meet and discuss their work. Turn Your Blog Into a Book If you import your blog feed, FastPencil will turn every blog post into a chapter. The service also imports images from these posts. These images have to be inserted at the beginning or end of a post, however. You can't have your text flow around an image. Publishing: Hardcover, Paperback, E-Book Once you have finished your book, you can publish it as an e-book and printed book. These services, however, do cost . These paid services include printing, obtaining ISBN numbers, and organizing the distribution of your book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram Digital and other retail partners. FastPencil also offers a number of editing services like design, illustration and editing services. Besides printing hardcover and paperback books, FastPencil can format books for virtually any digital platform, including DRM-free ePub e-books and the Kindle. Don't Need All These Services? Try SmashWords If you don't need all of these services from Fast Pencil - or if you have already finished your book - another service worth looking at is SmashWords . Smashwords specializes in e-books. Thanks to deals with Barnes & Noble and Sony in the US and Indigo Books & Music's Shortcovers in Canada, self-published authors can get their e-books into traditional distribution channels, or sell their books directly on SmashWords. Smashwords acquired the New Zealand-based e-book self-publishing service BookHabit earlier this week. Discuss

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FastPencil: Turn Your Blog Posts into a Published Book