I’m taking some time off beginning today. I’ll return after the New Year. Stay well and enjoy the holidays.

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There are a lot of Christmas classics, many of which are now but a click away, in a cavalcade of online video clips available.

While I style myself as a Scrooge, each and every one gets to me right where it counts–most especially the first I posted here: Judy Garland at the peak of her promise, singing, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in the movie, “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

So, have yourself a Merry little Festivus now, and enjoy four others I posted too.

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About 10 days ago, there was a post in this column titled “MySpace and News Corp. Eye Flixster (But for What?)” about interest by News Corp. and its MySpace unit in Flixster, the popular social networking site for movies.

Well, BoomTown did more gumshoeing and the deal is indeed shaping up to be very complex, according to many sources I spoke with, centered on Rotten Tomatoes merging with Flixster in exchange for a stake in the combined independent company by News Corp. and a possible integration of content with MySpace.

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A few weeks ago, BoomTown motored down to Silicon Valley, to the Redwood City, Calif., HQ of Zazzle, the online site that lets users order a variety of custom products by using a special (and patented) printing technology.

I went to talk to the Beaver brothers–Jeff and Bobby, who founded the company with their father, who is CEO, way back before the first Web 1.0 bubble burst in 1999–about recent changes, including finding more ways to slap custom designs on more products and recent international expansion.

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While new computers, game players and all kinds of digital hoo-ha are among the top-selling gifts this holiday season, giant crowds of consumers have still descended and will be flocking to cineplexes across the country yesterday, today, tomorrow on Christmas day, and throughout the weekend.

And from the first box office reports, it looks like the crude CGI of “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” is besting the geektastic sci-fi blockbuster, “Avatar.”

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Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg already has one of the shinier resumes in Silicon Valley as a Harvard grad with stints at the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury Department and Google, as well as a seat on the board of coffee kingpin Starbucks.

She was also named one of Fortune magazine’s 50 Most Powerful Women this year, clocking in at No. 22.

Now Sandberg has been nominated to be a director on the Disney board, a position that will get rubberstamped at the entertainment giant’s annual meeting in March.

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Full disclosure: BoomTown is several hours into the spiked eggnog here at All Things Digital Worldwide HQ, so our headlines are 100 percent spikier!

All joking aside and without much blabbery from me, Twitter just acquired Mixer Labs, makers of GeoAPI, which helps developers build location-based services.

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While Internet companies such as Google use baked goods as names for their key strategic initiatives–recent ones related to its Android mobile operating system were called Donut and Eclair, for example–aggressive media giant News Corp. is definitely not going for sweetness in its unusual selection of a code name for its high-profile digital content effort.

That would be Project Alesia, a moniker that comes from a vicious siege in ancient times widely considered to be one of the more decisive battles in history.

And that is apparently what top News Corp. execs think is the best way to describe their plans for stopping the decimation of premium content in the digital age and transforming their business to take advantage of new means of distribution.

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To start, let’s just dispense with huffing and puffing angst over whether or not people should broadcast their credit card transactions online.

Because that’s what you can do on a new site, with the unlikely name of Blippy, headed by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Philip “Pud” Kaplan.

In other words, a kind of Twitter for spending–the next step in the inevitable trend toward radical transparency online.

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Yesterday, BoomTown posted some of the very funny spoof videos related to MTV’s appalling-yet-riveting “Jersey Shore” that have been popping up online.

Here is an even better one, with some of the actual cast members of the reality television show perfectly mocking themselves in yet another terrific Web video from Funny or Die, which seems to be on a roll of late.

The video contemplates the very deep concept of what if “Jersey Shore” is all a joke that those dopes are actually in on.

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While conducting a tour of Twitter’s hip new HQ in San Francisco, BoomTown sat down to do a video interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

Stone talked about where the much hyped start-up has been and where it is going.

He called the current period “the end of the beginning” for Twitter and noted that 2010 will be all about “building a business.” Stone also said he wants people to think of Twitter much less as a microblogging service and much more as an “information network.”

In the past, I have dubbed him: No-Biz-Like-No-Biz-Plan Stone. But in 2010, I might have to change that to Down-to-Biz Nose-to-the-Grind-Stone.

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With Google in the market for pretty much, well, everything, in the Web 2.0 space of late–using its fat stock price and copious cash reserves–it stands to reason that Microsoft would be in the same market too.

But will the software giant enter the fray as a rival bidder to the search behemoth or will it seek battle on the regulatory battlefield?

In other words, if you don’t bid, do you block?

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Why Twitter invited BoomTown back for another visit to its latest HQ after my last one, I will never know.

But the masters of microblogging did.

So, here is my video of the lovely new digs in San Francisco, where a little over 100 Twitter employees toil–although it’s pretty pleasant toiling, with room for about 200 more–in offices most recently occupied by AOL’s now-banished Bebo social networking site.

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Whatever you think of “Jersey Shore,” the blithely offensive reality show on MTV, its broad-brush depiction of Italian-Americans makes it perfect for online spoofing.

Thus, here is the best of them from Funny or Die.

It’s a clever technology-fueled transformation of actress Alyssa Milano into Snooki, the program’s dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers “guidette.”

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Words fail here, while the pictures tell the whole tale of holiday cheer combined with Apple love. Yes, Virginia, there is a cheese block dock for your Santa app.

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