Over the next few days, a picture of holiday sales will begin to materialize.

One of the first reports to surface doesn't sound incredibly painful until specific categories--like electronics--are broken out. And then the hurt becomes obvious.

MasterCard Advisors, a unit of the credit card giant, released on Friday its SpendingPulse analysis of national retail and service sales for the holiday-shopping season.

Overall retail sales year over year (excluding gasoline, which doesn't make a great holiday gift anyway) were down 2 percent in November and down 4 percent from December 1 to 24.

Overall, e-commerce fared relatively well … Read more

Here I am using my two unread newspapers as a thick place mat for my Christmas Eve Chinese lunch, and what should cross my desk: a new Pew study showing that the Internet has surpassed newspapers as Americans' main source for national and international news.

How appropriate--albeit a little sad for this ol' school journalist who still romanticizes about the days when you could truly stop the presses.

Some 40 percent of those surveyed by Pew Research for the People & the Press say they get most of their international and national news from the Internet, up from 24 percent … Read more

A federal court in Northern California has awarded $33.15 million to Verizon Communications in what the company is calling the largest cybersquatting judgment ever.

Verizon, which announced the judgment Wednesday, had filed the case against OnlineNIC, a San Francisco-based Internet domain registration company. Verizon had claimed that OnlineNIC used Internet names--663 to be exact--that were chosen to be easily confused with legitimate Verizon names, according to Verizon.

It might be hard, however, for Verizon to actually collect on the judgment, which was a default ruling, or one entered against a defendant who fails to answer a summons. No one … Read more

Here's a little statistical cheer for online retailers bracing themselves for what many have been predicting will be a dismal holiday sales season.

The latest online retail spending report released Tuesday by ComScore shows that consumers last weekend spent almost double what they spent on the corresponding weekend before Christmas last year. U.S. consumers online spent $677 million last weekend, December 20 and 21, compared to $341 million the weekend before Christmas in 2007, which was December 22 and 23.

It should be noted, however, that there are five fewer days this year between Thanksgiving and Christmas, making … Read more

Yesterday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a post suggesting that president-elect Obama needs to do more than throw money at ailing industries, but actually needs to "reboot" America by investing in infrastructure and education. In Newsweek, law professor and intellectual property thinker Lawrence Lessig argued for a more narrowly focused reboot of the FCC, which should be encouraging technical innovation but instead tends to favor big incumbents.

But what about the music industry? Yes, the big labels have earned a lot of scorn for their technophobia and suing their customers--a practice which finally ended last week… Read more

Correction, 3:05 p.m. PT January 7: This story incorrectly identified the firm underwriting FriendFinder's IPO. The firm providing that service is Renaissance Securities (Cyprus) Limited.

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

FriendFinder Networks, the company formerly known as Penthouse Media Group, is filing to go public to pay off almost a half a billion in debt in an equity market that stinks. Simply put, FriendFinder is launching an IPO Hail Mary to stay alive. At least FriendFinder's initial public offering filing turned up a bunch of interesting nuggets.

FriendFinder is best known … Read more

As it has for the past four years, Google will be mapping Santa Claus' trek from the icy North Pole to rooftops around the globe on Christmas Eve. But this year, good girls and boys can track their gifts via mobile phones and Twitter, too.

Starting at 3 a.m. PST on Wednesday, a Google Map with Santa's current location will be displayed on the NORAD Santa Web site, operated by Google and the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

Santa fans can also track his movements in 3D in Google Earth (download) by downloading a special NORAD Tracks Santa KML. … Read more

Residents of the Redding and Chico areas of Northern California who had still been watching analog TV were moved to digital channels on Monday as the CBS, NBC, and Fox stations permanently switched to digital-only TV two months ahead of the national mandate.

Station executives said on Tuesday that the transition went well, except for those households that didn't have an analog-to-digital converter.

"We did a good job about getting the word out about converter boxes early," said Doug Holroyd, general manager of Fox KCVU, which serves as many as 12,000 households.

The station gave away … Read more

A publisher of mostly small, local newspapers has sued the New York Times Co. over its aggregation of news headlines on Boston.com, challenging the practice many sites use of linking to other sources.

In its lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts on Monday, Fairport, N.Y.-based GateHouse Media, which publishes more than 100 papers in Massachusetts, accuses the Times of violating copyright by allowing its Boston Globe online unit to copy verbatim … Read more