Totsy Offers Deep Discounts For Moms, Partners With Genealogy App FamilyBuilder

While consumers around the U.S. are sniffing out Black Friday deals today, sample sale sites have emerged to provide members with serious discounts year round. Online sample sales sites such as Gilt Groupe, HauteLook, Ideeli, RueLaLa and others, have been picking up serious traction in the past year.

We've seen a plethora of sites pop up for women's and men's clothing and accessories, travel deals and even children's clothes. Totsy, an invitation only sales site that features children's brands, baby gear and products, recently launched to appeal to parents looking for a bargain.

In The Age Of Realtime, Twitter Is Walter Cronkite

The year is 1963. It's November. At 1:40 PM ET, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite comes on the air. "In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting." Rapidly, everyone in America descends upon the closest television set to tune in.

Thankfully, we have not yet had a tragedy of that magnitude in the age of the realtime web. But we will. It's just a matter of time.

If it were to happen today, most people would still turn to their TV sets to get the most up-to-date information on such an event. We saw that on September 11, 2001. But a large number of people would also now turn to the web. And there they would likely find the information they were looking for faster than those watching on television. We've seen it time and time again recently.

Video Professor Tries To Bully Washington Post, Fails

Video Professor continues to be angry that I called them a scam in my original Scamville post. They've gotten nowhere reaching out to me directly (more on that below), so now they've tried complaining to the Washington Post, which has syndicated our content since 2008. The Washington Post stood firm beside us today and kept our original post as written. Good for them.

Essentially Video Professor is arguing that they didn't have the chance to respond to our post before we published, and that in general we aren't behaving very journalistically.

One of my favorite habits of journalists is that they refuse to state an opinion. Instead, they find a source to say whatever it is they want said and then quote them. And when I say "favorite," what I really mean is that I hate it.

The story the journalist writes has the look of objectivity but really it's just the same as if the journalist wrote what she or he meant, directly, in the first place. A gold star journalist will then find a "balancing" quote from someone else, often the person or entity being attacked. "When did you stop beating your wife," etc.

I prefer to just skip all that nonsense and get right to the meat of a matter. And most of my favorite bloggers do the same. None of us have the audacity to think that we are your only news source. You can find other opinions elsewhere, and judge them on their merits, too.

Video Professor was a side note in our original Scamville post, just one of a bunch of scams that were making their way into social games on Facebook and MySpace. But now we're focused on them like a laser.

Gillmor Gang: Silverlight v. ChromeOS v. Chatter

The Gillmor Gang convened Wednesday to ponder the last several weeks of events loosely contained in a discussion of the next generation Web operating system. Three major announcements set the table for this Thanksgiving edition: Google's ChromeOS, Microsoft's Silverlight 4, and salesforce's Chatter collaboration platform. The last might be pigeonholed as enterprise Twitter, but Marc Benioff's position as a central driver of Web Services since the last collaboration shootout in Y2K suggests there's more to Chatter than meets the casual social media eye.

This edition sports some familiar longtime Gangsters, including Ziff Davis Enterprise and ITBusinessEdge editor Mike Vizard and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis, who promises not to agree to time limits on his next bets. Alert listeners of the old RSS-bound version of The Gang will recall Calacanis bet a sushi dinner that Google would launch its own OS. I pinned him down to one year, and unfortunately the bet was joined 3 or 4 years ago. Even if you accept the idea that ChromeOS is a real OS, then the next bet might be when Silverlight merges into the new Windows. Robert Scoble says no Silverlight Office for 5 years. I say 2 years tops.

More recent regular Kevin Marks continues to party down on the notion that HTML 5 will hit the mainstream shortly. Kevin sees Microsoft's announced support for Silverlight video transcoded to Apple streaming format for the iPhone as a validation of HTML5, but there's no getting around Microsoft's aggressive use of Silverlight to push the market ahead of HMTL 5's progress in the video area.

Thanksgiving: a displaced Brit writes…

When I first heard about this "Thanksgiving" thing, I thought it sounded like a great idea.

We Brits spend a ridiculous amount of time each day giving thanks to strangers - we say thanks to people who hold doors for us, thanks to people who stop their cars to let us cross the road, thanks to waitresses when they give us our bill; even thanks again when we hand over the money to pay. But apparently you Americans - innovative people that you are - had found a way to streamline the process.

Rather than waste hours each day expressing gratitude, you had decided to compress all of your thank-yous into one annual 24-hour-period of uninterrupted Thanks Giving. Get all that politeness out of the way in one go. An inspired solution, I though, and one we should copy back home. Hell, we should have a 'sorry' day too - we'd reclaim weeks of time.

But apparently I'd got the wrong end of the stick. Having consulted Wikipedia, it turns out that today is not about mundane expression of gratitude, but rather about big-ticket Thank-yous. For friends, family, a baby's laugh, spreadable cheese. Stuff that really makes it a joy to be alive, and living in the home of the brave.

In just under an hour, I'm heading out to my first ever Thanksgiving dinner; I gather there will be turkey involved, and sweet potatoes - whatever they might be. And, despite my British cynicism, I'm very excited. But before I go, given that today's celebrations began with some Brits moving to the USA and giving thanks for its awesomeness, I thought it might be appropriate to share five things - technological and otherwise - that make me... well.. thankful that a few months ago I too decided to make America my new home.

Here goes...