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Amazon.com shares reached another all-time high today as investors embraced the company's e-commerce prospects this holiday season and Amazon said its Kindle reader hit a new (undisclosed) sales record. Shares of the e-commerce giant were up more than 3 percent to $135.91 on Monday, and continue to climb in after-hours trading. The company's shares surged than 25 percent in late October after a strong third quarter earnings report.

The folks at Akamai put together a fun map that gives a snapshot of sorts of this Cyber Monday, tracking web traffic to more than 270 major e-commerce sites. Right now, at just after 1:30 Pacific Time, it's showing over 7.1 million visits per minute, which is 35 percent above normal. This doesn't provide the full online retail picture, or indicate actual sales, but it's interesting to see all the activity worldwide.

Blue Nile isn't known as a discount retailer, but the online diamond merchant is trying to get in on some of the Cyber Monday action. The company for the first time is offering discounts on select pieces of jewelry in the post-Thanksgiving period (starting with a "diamond eternity bracelet" today, which is already listed as sold out), and offering free overnight shipping on Cyber Monday purchases.

Amazon.com is trumpeting the sales success of its Kindle electronic reader, without actually giving any data to back it up. The e-commerce giant put out a release today calling November "the best sales month ever for Kindle, even before Cyber Monday," and it repeated the mantra that Kindle is "most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon."

Clearly, Amazon is seeking to promote Kindle this holiday season and capitalize on the supply problems that have bedeviled its leading e-reader competitors, Barnes & Noble's Nook and Sony's new Daily Edition. But given Amazon's penchant for secrecy on Kindle sales numbers, you'll have to take Amazon's crowing with a big grain of salt.

The e-commerce battle between Amazon.com and Wal-Mart is shaping up as a win-win for both companies, at least in terms of web traffic. The two retailers saw a big jump in unique visitors on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, with Amazon up 28 percent and Wal-Mart up 22 percent, according to internet measurement firm comScore. Overall U.S. online spending on Black Friday was up 11 percent from the same day a year ago, hitting $595 million.

Hopefully, at this point, everyone has recovered from their turkey- and stuffing- induced food coma. We are getting back to business, and are looking forward to a busy week in the Seattle technology community. But before moving ahead, we're taking a look back at the most discussed stories on TechFlash of the past week. Here's what you missed in case you're just tuning in, along with some featured reader comments.

"Datel sues Microsoft over Xbox 360 memory unit crackdown" (23 comments): "Now that MS has killed my Datel, and effectively erased all my game saves I've decided that I like my PS3 better. I am the customer MS should want to keep, not drive away." -- Reader Moses Joseph.

"Microsoft, Murdoch vs. Google: Smart move, or sheer madness?" (15 comments): "Google is just a well paid paper boy, News Corp would rather not pay the paper boy so much to throw the paper in your drive way. This is Ballmer's genius in deconstructing the paper boy's rich paper route." -- Reader Andrew Milligan.

"Exclusive: InfoSpace gets into ecommerce biz with Haggle" (11 comments): "What's entertaining is that Haggle started out as a small auction website acquired by Go2Net for an absurd amount of money; this was in the dotcom era when you could sell anything with an HTML tag for millions of dollars. The site was eventually decommissioned once it was by realized by the powers-that-be that it had no value. Go2Net was eventually acquired by InfoSpace, and it's amusing to see the long-dead site being reanimated in it's current form." -- Reader Go2Net Alumni.

"Seattle angels back DevHub" (8 comments): "The investment received by DevHub/EvoMedia will add to the creative and innovative progress they have shown over the past year. DevHub is a media force to watch." --Reader clickbobb.

"What's on your geek gift list?" (8 comments): "Me, I just want gadgets that remain cool and useful after 90 days out of the box, and don't require a manual for basic functions. (In the four years I reviewed gadgets for Q13, the latter was a key evaluation component -- that a mere mortal could get started without the manual.)" --Reader Frank Catalano.

Amazon.com typically trounces Wal-Mart when it comes to online traffic on Cyber Monday, that moment after the Thanksgiving holiday when people traditionally shop from their home or work computers. But WalMart.com usually rules Thanksgiving Day, as people get ready to head out for Black Friday sales in retail stores.

That Thanksgiving pattern held true again this year -- but there are signs that it may be changing. WalMart.com was the Thanksgiving leader for the fifth year in a row, according to numbers released today by the Experian Hitwise research firm. However, Amazon narrowed the gap, grabbing 12.4 percent of the traffic received by the top 500 U.S. retail sites. Wal-Mart's traffic was just under 15 percent.

As Amazon.com fires up for Black Friday and holiday shopping, the ecommerce giant is making plans for a new distribution center to store and ship products. The Charlotte Business Journal reports the company is looking for a site for a more than 500,000-square-foot warehouse in York County and other counties in South Carolina.

That would mark a change of direction for Amazon, which streamlined its U.S. distribution network earlier this year, shuttering three major warehouses in Munster, Ind., Red Rock, Nev., and Chambersburg, Pa.

After watching the rise of YouTube, Microsoft launched its own Soapbox video site. After seeing Craigslist pull in huge amounts of traffic, the Redmond company launched its own online classifieds, Windows Live Expo. Its Evite competitor? That would be Windows Live Events.

And now, with social networks grabbing the attention of the online world, Microsoft is doing something extraordinary: It’s not really competing at all.

Rather than launching a direct rival to Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, Microsoft is working with those services to incorporate their features into its own products. Analysts say the newfound pragmatism reflects the struggles of such services as Windows Live Expo, Windows Live Events and Soapbox — all of which have since been abandoned — and Microsoft's focus on challenging Google in the search market.

More broadly, it also reflects a growing sentiment in the tech industry that the big social networks have achieved a critical mass that makes them practically untouchable to potential competitors (though perhaps not to potential acquirers). That affects the strategies not just of Microsoft but also of Amazon.com and countless tech startups.

Tech financiers in 2010 should avoid giving money to “anyone trying to build his own social network,” said Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Seattle-based online real estate company Redfin, during a recent Washington Technology Industry Association panel. “I think you should use the existing networks that are out there.”

The Washington Post and Amazon.com are joining forces for an e-commerce experiment. When books are mentioned in Post articles and reviews, the newspaper links to an online store powered by Amazon, where readers can buy the books in question. The Post then receives a percentage of any sales.

It's certainly an interesting way for a newspaper to squeeze more revenue from online content, though it does raise issues about the wall between the newspaper's editorial and business units. The Post is stressing that journalists have nothing to do with placing of the links.

Will holiday shoppers spend more online this year than they did last year, right after the economy took a tumble? ComScore seems to think so. The internet analytics firm is forecasting that online retail spending in the November-December period will grow 3 percent to $28.8 billion, from the same two months a year ago.

Maybe that's why Amazon kicked off Black Friday deals on a Monday.

Amazon is juicing up its Kindle reader for the holidays. The electronic reader now has battery life of up to seven days even with wireless turned on — up from four days previously. And it's getting a native PDF reader so people can read documents their original PDF format without conversion.

Kindle's battery life with the wireless turned off is the same as before: up to 2 weeks.

Bellevue-based InfoSpace is the mystery company behind a new e-commerce website called Haggle that lets people bid on computers, electronics, game consoles and other items, TechFlash has learned. It's an online auction site with a gimmick: people pre-purchase bid packs — ranging from 20 to 600 — and use them to place bids on individual items.

InfoSpace has actually owned the Haggle domain name since the dot-com era, but just relaunched it three weeks ago as an active website.

The move into online shopping is an interesting turn of events for InfoSpace, which spent the past several years shedding businesses in order to concentrate on internet search.

Farecast made some waves in the online travel business a few years ago when founder and University of Washington computer scientist Oren Etzioni came up with an algorithm to predict whether airfares on selected flights would go up or down.

That technology -- following Microsoft's acquisition of Farecast last year for $115 million -- now serves as the core of the new Bing Travel. But here's a unique twist on the Farecast concept. What if you could accurately predict which flights will be delayed? That's the idea behind a San Francisco startup called FlightCaster, which this week announced $1.3 million in funding from Sherpalo Ventures and others.

Credit: Blue Origin

A veil of secrecy has surrounded Blue Origin — Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos' project to build a rocket to take paying customers into space. Now the company is giving a hint of its plans. Blue Origin on its website is now giving a timeline for "flight opportunities," saying it expects to take unmanned scientific experiments into space in 2011 and actual astronauts into space in 2012. The company said it's already selected three research experiments.

Blue Origin, which has a facility in Kent, Wash., and a launch pad in West Texas, is developing New Shepard, described as "a vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle."