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Mark Ghuneim is the Founder/CEO of real-time digital marketing agency and technology incubator Wiredset and social media tracking service Trendrr.

As 2009 sneaks its way into the annals of history, many are taking this time of year to join for the holidays or reflect on the year that was. As the most measurable, social year in human history, the tools of 2009 showed us how fast something can catch on, who is talking about what and how small the world has become. In that spirit, we have created some data visualizations to show how Christmas buzz is taking shape and what products are being talked about on the web.

1. Christmas on Twitter

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Christmas, though confined to a day or two in December, is a buzz term all year long, with an escalation of thousands per day starting in the Fall and ratcheting up to a fever pitch as the holiday grows closer. Though we haven’t seen the full spike mature yet, tweets containing either the term “xmas” or “Christmas’ are now nearing 20,000 per hour or over 300 per minute.

Compare this to last year when we showed a very similar graph and tweets for “Christmas” were topping out at 40k per day and you’ll get a sense of how much Twitter has exploded in 2009.

2. Christmas in the News

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Since November 1, Google News is showing 111,493 new results and a massive 106 million new blog results for the term “Christmas”, driven in part by the indexing of tweets, as the search giant makes a meaningful move into the real-time future.

3. Christmas in Photos and Video

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As the social web matured this year, photo and video sharing has become second nature to many. With more smartphones and applications making this type of engagement possible, expect to see these sectors flourishing in 2010. Notice below, videos tagged “Christmas” on YouTube pushed the video portal to its public API return max for a tag to 1 million by mid-December.

4. Obama Vs. Claus

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President Obama is one of the most talked about people on Twitter year round, but in this season, he and Santa duel for prominence in the public’s mind.

5. Love Vs. Hate

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In the epic battle of love vs. hate, there is a clear winner on Twitter this holiday season.

6. Location-Based Tweets in NYC

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An important trend for 2010, as recently described by Pete Cashmore, is location-based social networking. And in the spirit of special sharing, here is a new feature set we at Wiredset are rolling out with Trendrr for the very first time: Data surrounding “check-ins” on Foursquare. Here’s a sample look at possible holiday activity in the Big Apple, as shown in “check-ins” per day.

7. Holiday Retail Wars

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And where are the “Twitterati” spending their shopping time? This graph, first shown by Jennifer Van Grove in a piece on Black Friday, shows how the rest of the heavy shopping season buzz panned out — with Amazon staying on top of giant retailers on Twitter.

8. Kindle Vs. iPhone

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Here is a look at Twitter buzz for two personal devices that captured America’s attention, harnessed imagination, and drove innovation in 2009. To put the buzz in perspective, most TV shows get less than 5,000 tweets per week. This shows the conversation levels per day.

9. Smartphone Blog Buzz

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With an average of over 100 million blog results returned for a typical Google search, iPhone is clearly the hottest blog topic in the smartphone category. Here’s a look at some others in the blog space.

10. Video Games

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The multi-billion dollar gaming industry is here to stay and will be a staple this holiday season in many homes. You can see the peaks driven by a flurry of new game announcements this fall, followed by a look at how new games are fairing on Amazon.

11. Zhu Zhu Pets on Amazon

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Every year there is a product that comes out of nowhere to become a must-have for the kiddos. This year the Zhu Zhus — robotic hamsters — are the new entrant making waves in the children’s category. Even with a consumer group contending parts of the anatomy to be unsafe in early December, the fuzzy robots have made their mark on consumers this year.

12. The 12 Days of Christmas Tweets

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Most know the song, but few can remember all the words to “The 12 Days of Christmas.” The first five days of Christmas are the most talked about on Twitter. Here is a look at them all.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Osuleo

Tags: charts, Christmas, graphs, Holidays, stats

Imagine shooting a live video with your iPhone, and having it show up on the desktop screens of friends and family — while you’re still shooting — without them having to hunt it down. Personal live-video streaming site Qik launched just such a feature today.

Qik has restricted access to the feature as an invite-only beta test program for now. The trick piece of software that makes it possible isn’t Qik’s videocasting app that runs on most upper-end phones. The trick is Qik’s desktop / laptop viewer built with Adobe Air, which means it runs identically on Windows, Macs, and Linux computers.

The application constantly checks for new video streams published live by Qik users whom the application’s user follows. It makes the user experience less like YouTube and more like cable TV, but also adds a live chat room alongside the video clip.

VentureBeat recently looked at the players in phone-based videocasting. For now, Qik seems unthreatened by close competition on livecasting features aside from Ustream. The real threat would be a YouTube built-in feature, but Google’s video-sharing site has yet to venture into seriously supporting live video from mobile gadgets.

Qik, based in Redwood City in Silicon Valley, was founded in 2007 and has secured $8.5 million in funding to date, most recently a third round in summer 2008. Investors include Quest Venture Partners, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen.

[Images: Qik]

If you’ve ever wanted to place an ad on a Susan Boyle performance, the JK Wedding Dance or, more recently, the dancing doctors in pink gloves, now you can.

YouTube has just launched a new tool that gives advertisers serious control over where their ads appear — all the way down to selecting individual videos.

In addition, the video-sharing site says that the new targeting options can suggest videos based on “keywords (like politics or fashion), viewer demographics (like age and gender), interest-based categories or some combination of the three.”

YouTube says that the features are currently beta and “intended for advertisers who work closely with sales representatives at YouTube,” but I was able to check it out by simply going to google.com/videotargeting and logging in with my Google account.

This marks yet another step in Google’s efforts to monetize YouTube, of which there have been many in the past year. The new options seem like a great addition that will create more efficiency — and perhaps revenue — in the YouTube ecosystem.

Tags: advertising, video, youtube

Just a few days ago we covered the Target and YouTube partnership around Holiday Solutions, a holiday-themed channel with brand sponsored content. We thought the idea made a lot of sense for both companies, and expected to see more brand partnerships develop on YouTube as a result.

It appears that it didn’t take long to happen, as today the popular video sharing site has just announced another partnership and unveiled a new fully-themed channel for parents.

This time around the channel goes by the name of For Mom, Kodak is the sponsor, and the goal is to ultimately serve as a resourceful video parenting sidekick. On first glimpse though, we’re also seeing For Mom content aimed at helping moms get a killer butt with a video on butt exercises by actress and mom Brooke Burke. Because all moms need a killer butt!

All joking aside, we like the idea of a parent hub and the cooking, parenting, toys and games, health, beauty, and even butt tips and advice could prove to be the power mom’s preferred internet video spot. Of course the channel wouldn’t be complete without Kodak content, product information, and even a family video portrait contest.

Given the quick fire release of Target and Kodak sponsored channels in the same week, we definitely expect to see more themed channels and partnerships with big brands in the near future.

Tags: channel, Kodak, youtube

DailyBooth is a photo sharing site that has been growing in popularity, as it easily lets you capture a photo of yourself via webcam and share it on Twitter.

Now, one of the largest photo sharing services for Twitter – yFrog – has just added a dead-simple webcam capture feature for both photo and video sharing.

Using the feature is easy. From yFrog’s homepage, select “webcam” as your upload method and a pop-up will let you select video, photo, or photo in 5 seconds (if you want time to get ready for your photo). Sign-in with Twitter using OAuth and the photo or video is published to your stream, with a link to the image on yFrog.

It’s a pretty neat feature that adds a visual twist to the status update, at least if you’re the type of person who carries your laptop with you everywhere.

Tags: twitter, yfrog

Filed under: Video, iTunes, Mac 101

Home Sharing is one of the fantastic new features in iTunes 9, and one that slipped between the cracks in our coverage in the days after the software was released. Sang Tang showed us how to use FireWire to speed up transfers over your network, but this is a basic overview of how Home Sharing works and how you can use it to easily share media files to different computers in your household.

This video was made using the new screen recording option in QuickTime X, which proved to be extremely easy and useful.

TUAWMac 101: Using Home Sharing in iTunes 9 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure, sure, the kids are all excited about iTunes LP and their fancy “lyrics” and “album art.” You know what we’re psyched about? Finally being able to manage our iPhone apps directly from iTunes 9. It works pretty much exactly as you’d expect, although we were able to make it do some minorly wonky things — and we’re psyched about the AutoFill-esque music sync feature that fills any remaining space on your phone with music.

We’re also pumped about the new Home Sharing feature in iTunes 9, which lets you transfer content between five different machines directly without screwing around with network shares or USB drives. We’ve seriously been waiting for a feature like this since iTunes sharing was first launched — it also works exactly like you’d expect, and we think it’ll make managing media across multiple machines much, much easier. Videos after the break!

Continue reading Video: iTunes 9 Home Sharing and iPhone app management

Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable Video, Software

Video: iTunes 9 Home Sharing and iPhone app management originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 17:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Firefox with Greasemonkey: The YouTube Auto Buffer Greasemonkey script tweaks the popular video sharing site to fix some of its most common annoyances. Specifically, it stops videos from automatically playing, turns on HD/HQ playback for all videos, and hides in-video advertisements.

All three of the tweaks YouTube Auto Buffer makes can be toggled, so if you’d really like to get rid of in-video ads but don’t want to always watch videos in HD or prefer that videos play automatically, you can just disable the two unwanted features. Or at least they can be toggled in theory. I had trouble getting my preferences to stick, so your mileage may vary.

Either way, it’s a nice little script that aims to fix some users’ common YouTube annoyances. For some other YouTube-specific tweaks, check out our very own Better YouTube Firefox extension. (With any luck, maybe we can convince Gina to incorporate some of the YouTube Auto Buffer features into said add-on.)

YouTube Auto Buffer is a free download, works with Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension.

A world record ought to be worth a Twitter trending topic, and sure enough Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt stormed into the top spot today — not just in the 200 meter race, but also on YouTube and Twitter.

The video of his 19.19 time, which had broken his own previous record set at last year’s Olympics, was uploaded to video-sharing juggernaut YouTube in droves within a few short hours of his victory.

Check out one of the many iterations of the video, and the record-shattering 19.19 time, below.

Tags: sports, usain bolt, video, viral video, world record, youtube