In 1958 Sears mistakenly printed NORAD’s phone number in its catalog instead of the number of its Santa hotline. Since then, NORAD has offered Santa-related services by phone. Currently, working together with Google, NORAD continues to offer the same service online during the holidays. To make this even more interesting, this past Christmas Eve, starting at 2 p.m. ET (GMT -5) the newly enhanced Santa Tracker went live. If you missed this epic event, rest assured come Christmas Eve 2010 you might even be able to track Santa’s activities through your Facebook account.
How was this all made possible? Google used the Google Earth plugin to power noradsanta.org and according to Gooogle over eight million people used the site to track Santa in 2008.
If you are one of the 63 million mobile Webusers in the U.S. Google also offered a mobile site m.noradsanta.org to track Santa’s journey over the holiday season. In terms of other new/emerging media that were utilised to support Google Earth Tracking of Santa, NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) also offered a Twitter account this year where “you can keep up with news about Santa’s flight.” This YouTube video, from U.S. Air Force General Gene Renuart, Commander of NORAD, explains how NORAD tracked Santa on Christmas Eve.
No matter what your new/emerging media of choice were this holiday season, it became clear that for most of us Santa is real. If you missed Santa’s travels around the globe on the NORAD Tracks Santa Web site, there was always the choice to join Santa’s over 1 million followers on Facebook. Arguably, new/emerging media has not only changed the ways in which we communicate with each other, but it has evidently created a new holiday tradition for many of us – tracking Santa online.
