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by Teresa Martin

Peanut butter and jelly. Ham and eggs. Maple syrup and pancakes. Ah, these are phrases that roll off the tongue, the product of natural and expected pairings.

But Google and Santa Claus?

Ho, Ho, Ho, that's right! Last week Google added Santa Claus and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (aka NORAD) to its list of partners.

No, I'm not kidding. You see, every year since 1955, the joint US-Canadian sky-guard NORAD has "tracked" Santa's journey around the world. It all started with a misprint in a newspaper ad - it seems the Colorado Spring Sears store was running a Santa hotline that Christmas of 1955 (a spiffy use of telephone technology as a promotional tool!) and, well, somehow the number that appeared in print was the Continental Air Defense Command Commander-in-Chief's operations hotline." Ooopsy.

Luckily, our military kept a sense of perspective along with a sense of humor and a tradition was born. I mean, if you want to track an airborne object like a sleigh and eight tiny reindeer, who better for the task than the agency charged with scanning the North American airspace?

Kids calling the number got an update on where Santa was and, when CONAD became NORAD a few years later, the tradition continued. In 1998 NORAD starting using the web to follow the big guy on his big night.

This year, you could participate in a special countdown (http://www.noradsanta.org/en/countdown.html) and on the red-letter day itself track Santa online in near real time! (http://www.noradsanta.org/en/home.html) And, you could do this through Google maps and even (for that 3D effect) through Google Earth. But wait, there's more!

If you yourself were on the move on the big night, you could use Google Maps for Mobile on your cell phone to keep tables on the jolly old elf. And there was even a Twitter stream devoted to his progress.

The tracking is actually a pretty cool geography lesson, complete with hi-res "Santa-cam" videos narrated by a variety of NORAD staff and photos from Google's Panoramio (http://www.panoramio.com/).

Panoramio is user-generated geo-tagged collection of millions of photos around the globe. Started by two long time friends in southeast Spain, the service was acquired by Google in mid-2007 and is truly an international image community. It's sort of like having little visual thought bubbles over dots on a map.

When Santa visits Zanzibar, you can click to see the white sands and blue water there. Or the skyline of Perth, Australia. Fireworks over Kowloon, Hong Kong. A red-roofed church in Vik, Iceland. Sparkling snow in Fargo, ND. The desert outside Palm Springs, CA. It's sort of the world's shared photo-geo-diary. For the non-geographically inclined, Santa was a pretty compelling way to visit all these places.

The Santa maps also tied into Wikipedia, another of the web's user collected and moderated content spaces. Not only could you see an image of a main avenue in Samara, Russia, you could also read that the city is located on the left bank of the Volga river and learn that it is home to the Russian Chocolate Factory and Rodnik vodka.

Santa-cam, Google maps, Wikipedia, Panoramio ... smush 'em together and out comes a mash-up. "Mash-up" is a term that was coined to describe what happens when you integrate a bunch of applications and content together. Kind of like an ice cream mix-in, you take a handful of smaller pieces, all of which are perfectly tasty on their own, and create something new from their aggregation.

Everyone searches for the killer app of the web, but we've been looking at it all along - it's the environment that gives us a fiber we can twist, braid, and weave into new kinds of collaborations, all made possible by this infrastructure and common structure that transcends the traditional barriers of time and place. Maybe it isn't as classic as peanut butter and jelly, but if it delivers Santa and reindeer, the rest can't be far behind.

Wishing you all a happy and productively collaborative 2009!