Will you be leaving your house this year to join the Black Friday madness?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Our good friend Frank Gruber has been working on Thankfulfor.com, a social gratitude journal.

Gruber writes that he and partner Jen Consalvo wanted to create "a forum for expressing gratitude routinely as a foundation for happiness and well-being."

Frank and Jen with Sir Richard Branson earlier this year.

"People come to the site and post what they are thankful for to their personal journal of thanks. People can also choose to send each Thankfulfor post to their social network on Twitter (each post starts with the #thankfulfor hashtag) extending the good vibes far and wide."

During the holiday season, Gruber's hosting a Gratitude Challenge for the remainder of the holiday season to encourage users around the world to spread the love. A great idea from a couple of great people!

Helping the Hungry Through YouTube Videos

Most of the Americans reading this are probably ridiculously stuffed with turkey and the associated edibles, but the good folks at YouTube recognized our annual gluttony as a great opportunity to help the less fortunate.

Using their own homepage and blog as a platform, the site asked users, a.k.a. Video Volunteers, to create videos to promote the hunger-related nonprofit of their choice. along with the organization Feeding America and special curator David Arquette, YouTube has selected three submissions on the site. Here's one we liked:

Next week, curator Morgan Freeman will kick off another round of submissions, this time focusing on human rights.

Search Traffic Gets Seasonal, Economy Remains Slow

Hitwise research director Heather Dougherty writes that year after year, Thanksgiving is the peak day for Internet visits to major retail websites, outstripping Black Friday, the day after Christmas, and other traditional big shopping days. Typically, for search engines, Thanksgiving also marks a peak in user searches for major retailers.

However, yearly trends show significant drops in traffic and searches between 2007 and 2008. And, Doughtery writes, "The daily visits to the Retail 500 are down compared to last year leading up to the big holiday weekend." Check out the purple line on this graph; it represents search traffic for major retail brands leading up to the holiday, and it's measurably lower than in previous years:

Also, the orange line on this graph shows site traffic stats for the same group of retailers. It, too, shows a decline from traffic in previous years.

Take heart, online retailers! Stats for traffic coming from email marketing are actually quite robust. Are email marketers with cleverly presented bargains succeeding in these times of woe and want? This seems to be the case.

SocialVibe's Facebook App Aims to Feed Folks in Need

SocialVibe is all about helping brands and users create positive social change. In a typical SocialVibe setup, a brand "sponsors" users, who take small actions and engagements to raise money for the charity of their choice.

The new SocialVibe Facebook app involves partnerships with multiple brands and allows users to help feed the hungry through the UN World Food Programme.

Users create virtual Thanksgiving tables, choose one of three decor themes, pick food items to bring, and and invite friends. By engaging in simple, free brand interactions, users are able to furnish their and their friends' tables with turkeys, mashed potatoes, and all the traditional dishes - and best of all, each food item in the app equates to a specific number of meals the UN World Food Programme will be able to provide to hungry families and individuals.

That wraps up this year's Thanksgiving around the web. What new sites, apps, or campaigns did you notice and love this year? Tell us all about them in the comments!

Not sure if your flight will leave on time? Surprisingly, the airlines often don't have the most accurate information. Flights will show up as 'On Time,' even though your plane, which is supposed to take off in 15 minutes, is still sitting on another airport 500 miles away. FlightCaster looks at data from the airlines, FAA and combines this with historical data and weather information to give you a more accurate picture. The result is a good prediction whether your flight will leave on time.

Flightcaster is available as an iPhone and Blackberry app. The service is also available on FlightCaster's website.

WorldMate

WorldMate, which is available in a free and Pro version for the iPhone, BlackBerry and most other mobile phone operating systems, gives you a one-stop shop for all your travel info. You can simply email receipts for your flight and hotel bookings to a private Worldmate address and the software will automatically update your itineraries on the mobile app. What makes the pro version so useful is that WorldMate also alerts you of delays and gate changes through push notifications and SMS messages. WorldMate also offers a list of nearby hotels and the ability to search for alternative flights if yours gets cancelled.

TripIt's iPhone app offers similar service.

TripCase

TripCase offers fewer features than WorldMate, but it's free and also comes with push notifications. It's available for the iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Besides flight information and baggage claim info, TripCase also allows you to send out information about your flight status to your friends and family. You can also publish photos on your personalized TripCase site.

Next Flight

If you get bumped off an oversold flight or miss a connection, Next Flight can help you find alternative flights. The company indexes schedules from over 1,100 airlines and 4,200 airports around the world. Next Flight currently sells for $2.99 in the App Store.

Flight Status

If you are just picking somebody up at the airport, Flight Status is a nice iPhone app that gives you arrival information, including which baggage claim to go to. Flight Status is only available for the iPhone and costs $4.99. Flight Status was developed by the same company as Next Flight and also features data from 1,100 airlines.

Bonus: Flight Advisor Twitter Feed

If you just want to get a quick overview of airport delays in the US, also have a look at the Flight Advisor Twitter feed.

What About You?

Do you have your own favorite travel apps that we didn't mention here? Let us know in the comments.

So it's a good time to take a quick look at some fun facts and trivia surrounding Thanksgiving. Please enjoy.

According to the National Turkey Foundation, approximately 690 million pounds of turkey were consumed in the United States during Thanksgiving 2007. This equals the weight of 4.48 million individuals of average weight (154 pounds); the population of Singapore as estimated by the last census in 2005.

2. Mary Had a Little Lamb Author Helped Make Thanksgiving a National Holiday

Sarah Josepha Hale is credited as the person most responsible for making Thanksgiving a national holiday in the United States. She also authored Mary Had a Little Lamb.

3. Benjamin Franklin: Turkey More Respectable than Bald Eagle

Benjamin Franklin, who proposed the turkey as the official United States' bird, was not happy when the bald eagle was chosen instead. In a letter to his daughter, Franklin referring to the eagle's "bad moral character," said: "For my own part I wish the Eagle had not been chosen the representative of our country" and "For in Truth, the Turk'y is in comparison a much more respectable bird and withal a true original native of America".

4. Franklin Roosevelt Thanksgiving Controversy

In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt changed Thanksgiving to a week earlier than usual so the Christmas shopping season would last longer. There was a tremendous outpouring of public disapproval over the next two years so, in 1941 he admitted his mistake and officially declared the fourth Thursday in November a national holiday for Thanksgiving.

5. Worlds Largest Turkey

The Worlds largest turkey sits just off Route 10, Frazee, MN (Map), also known as the turkey capital of the world.

6. Aldrin and Armstrong First Lunar Meal was Turkey

According to the National Turkey Foundation, when Armstrong and Aldrin sat down to eat their first meal on the moon, their foil food packets contained roasted turkey.

7. Freeze Dried Feast for Astronauts

The seven Endeavour astronauts and three space station crew members enjoyed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, cornbread stuffing and green beans.

This also provides an interesting opportunity for our non-US-based readers to get a glimpse into some of the strange goings-on of their American counterparts. No doubt, it will provide more insight into the US culture than we care to divulge.

The video is Windows Media based, so if you're on another platform, you'll need to have the appropriate plugins installed prior to viewing. And another thing, this appears to be traditional traffic cam technology, so take the "streaming" description with a grain of salt. It gets pretty choppy on some of the views.

To get an idea of what's in store, you can view previous years' parades, like this one from last year. To tune in, visit EarthWeb's Thanksgiving 2008.

(Thanks to the_wb for allowing us to use the balloon image under Creative Commons.)