You can track Santa at
www.noradsanta.org starting
at 2am ET on December 24.
You'll see a Google Map that will display Santa's location over the course of the
day.
To visualize Santa in Google Earth, click
"Track Santa in Google Earth" and you'll see St. Nick
flying through Google Earth in your browser. (If you don't have the Earth plug-in,
click here — it will be installed automatically when you download Google Earth
5.1.)
NORAD's Santa-tracking
dates back to 1955, when a Sears and Roebuck magazine ad in
Colorado Springs accidentally directed readers to call NORAD instead of the "Talk-to-Santa" hotline they were
advertising.
The elves at NORAD provided callers with Santa's location
according to their radar and have tracked his journey ever since.
When I was a kid, you would see it on the evening news on Christmas Eve.
In 2004, Google started with their
"Keyhole Earth Viewer" to display Santa's voyage around the world using a single machine and getting 25,000
users following the sleigh. Last year, it was more than 8 million...
The
real NORAD site is at
http://www.norad.mil. The North American Aerospace Defense
Command (NORAD) is a bi-national United States and Canadian organization charged with the missions of aerospace warning
and aerospace control for North America.