Planning for the post-Thanksgiving craze

Thanksgiving is all about the shopping. OK, there’s turkey, too. But everyone knows about the turkey. Shopping is where you can have some fun.

There are several things that I wanted to see on your newspaper site on Thanksgiving, including:
• A shopping blog telling me where and when the best deals are.
• A mapped list of stores with hours, links to their sites and their sales.
• A database of the year’s top gift items/suggestions — searchable by age group, gender, relationship, location, Web sites and price.
• Tips for shoppers caught in the mess.
• Tips on how to relax after a day of shopping.
• Reader polls — that can be answered online or by cell phone.
• The stories and graphics you should have been doing on safe toys.

Then, on the day after Thanksgiving, follow it up by live-blogging the shopping experience. Send people out to stores so you know when they run out of that must-have item, when lines are wrapped around which buildings, when a little old lady is trampled by the mob, etc. Let people submit their own stories and photos online and via cell phone.

That’s what I wanted to find — not at all what I found.