Bill Tancer of Hitwise Intelligence writes about the holiday shopping season on the web just ended and how it compares to prior years. One finding of note is that "the household income demographic bin with the strongest decline when comparing December 2008 to December 2007 is the upper bracket of those households earning more than $150,000 per year."

See also TechCrunch's commentary. READ MORE »

Pamela Yip writes for the Dallas Morning News that Macy's had a systems issue on Saturday, December 20th that "may have caused multiple debits to some customers' checking accounts."

It's almost the end of 2008 ("good riddens" comes to my mind!) - and we've been exploring a bit. Steve Rubel had a great blog post this morning about using Google's Insights for Search feature to read the "tea leaves" about trends in 2009. He calls it "the closest thing we have to a global time capsule."

One interesting result I found was looking at how PayPal has trended over the last four years - with over twice as much interest demonstrated in PayPal today vs. four years ago.

Another interesting result in the PayPal summary is the strong interest in the UK vs. the US, France and other markets around the world. The top PayPal search term is "PayPal UK" - wonder why that is?

Here's one for Twitter - showing how interest in Twitter has grown like a weed during 2008.

Using the Google Insights for Search tool, you can search for and compare multiple terms - for example, here's PayPal vs. MasterCard - showing search interest in MasterCard remaining flat while PayPal's grew steadily. Curiously, if you look at the top searches related to MasterCard, the top result is "mastercard visa".

Give Google Insights for Search a try using your favorite payments-related phrase. If you find more interesting results, please share them in the comments here!

• CreditCards.com: 9 predictions for credit cards in 2009
• Bankelele: Bank’s Need to Embrace MPesa
• TheSpec.com - Business (Canada): Credit fees skyrocketing
• Digital Money Forum Blog: Defending cash
• San Mateo Daily JournalVisa moving HQ to San Francisco