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Its nice to know that I can always count on the Denver Nuggets to be unbelievably vile and inappropriate.  I opened up my copy of the Denver Post on the first Night of Hanukkah and was given this special gift as a reminder that people are stupid (sorry about the hatchet job with the scissors, its been a very rough week).

Yes, I know that this is probably unintentional and hopefully both Arby’s and Chris Anderson are embarrassed that they put a giant picture of a tatted up angry looking thug giving the old “sieg heil” salute, but still, gimmie a freaking break.

Just another reason to despise both the creators of the slimy, stomach churning “Big Mo” and of course my hometown Denver Thuggets.

I’ve been doing the online marketing thing for over 15 years now, so you’d think I wouldn’t be surprised when Cyber Monday drops the hammer on the holiday shopping season.  Once again, we blew last year’s Cyber Monday number out of the water and as is customary, I was pretty surprised.  It happens every year, but I still am shocked at how people have become so conditioned to start shopping when the media tells them to.

The early reports are showing an 11% increase for online sales across the board, which is a great sign considering the fact that our economy is a long, long way from recovery.  The question though should really be about profit.

Yesterday I took part in the annual tradition of vulturing deals from online stores.  I picked up a copy of Guitar Hero 5 for twenty bucks with free shipping from Amazon, I grabbed a wireless mouse and keyboard combo with free shipping for forty bucks from Dell and I almost bit on 20% off sales at the Dodgers MLB store and Palmer Cash (I do love my funny t-shirts).  I shopped the loss leaders and like most online shoppers, failed to add any “regularily priced” items to my cart.

All this makes me wonder if stores are really making any money on these crazy doorbuster deals.  I know we’re very strategic about what we sell and the price we sell it at when it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday specials, but are stores really making much money on $3.99 DVDs when customers like me are only grabbing those deals and not bothering to even look at anything else?

It seems that Google is getting ready to roll the new Google Caffeine update live.  Based on everything I’ve heard and read, this shouldn’t have a drastic impact on the SERPs, but whenever Google makes what it calls a significant update, I get nervous.

On the positive side, Matt Cutts has stated that the update probably won’t happen until after the holidays, which I’m sure has something to do with the nightmare that was the Florida update back in 2003.  During the holiday selling season, the last thing anyone wants to worry about is losing their precious #1 and above the fold rankings.

The bossman was nice enough to talk me off the ledge on this one, reminding me that based on Google’s “content is king” mantra and the fact that we play by the rules from an SEO perspective, any major updates should only have a positive impact on our sites.  I hope he’s right, but I guess we’ll find out in January (or when I can get my hands on the Caffeine Datacenter).