The queues of stressed parents hoping to get the latest Christmas toy is a sight many associate with the crass commercialisation of the holiday. This year parents have opted out, leaving their children to scurry from shop to shop, searching for that gift that Mammy and Daddy cannot do without. Things have not changed too much, as this year's gift is again a computer console, but now these machines are being aimed at the older generation, who are eager to join the computer generation, but dislike fighting, shooting or pretending to be a monster.

Avoid forays into the crowded high street this year and take the annual splurge online. By Tom Rowe

Those of us who witnessed Owen Pallett perform in the Foggy Notions tent at this year's Electric Picnic were impressed enough to warrant a high degree of anticipation for the Vicar St. show on 11 December, although a festival addled mind is prone to strange conclusions.

The latest sensation in online donation is the website Freerice.com that donates ten grains of rice to combat world hunger for every vocabulary question you answer correctly. Affiliated with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which distributes the food, Freerice.com is an interesting example of the ‘free click' charity websites in that it is actually a bit of fun to use.

In the US, the New York Times is the most popular online newspaper, with 17.5 million unique readers visiting the site in October, up from 14.6 million in September. This leap can probably be attributed to the fact that in September, with little fanfare, www.nty.com dropped its TimesSelect subscription services.

French documentary maker Nicolas Philibert, the subject of a retrospective in the recent French Film Festival in Dublin's IFI, spoke to Village about his belief that documentary is the victim of many misconceptions.

New figures released by the Central Statistics Office show that overseas travel by Irish people has continued to increase significantly. The CSO survey shows that almost 98000 more Irish residents travelled overseas this September than last September. The figures show 731400 trips abroad in that month, compared with 638500 in 2006, an increase of 14.5 per cent.

In the past week Village has gone DEAF, got savvy, dusted off the old glow sticks and got down to some disco beats.

Named for the tide that flows up and down the nearby Liffey, or for the traditional tune, guidebooks claim that The Flowing Tide benefits from its proximity to the Abbey Theatre. Some certainly benefited in 1907 when they took refuge in the pub from the violence in the theatre after Synge's Playboy of the Western World was first performed.

Talk is cheap, so they say. It certainly is if your boss pays for your Internet and you make use of the various means of free communication available to the savvy webwatcher